A linguistic perspective on communicative language teaching

Despite a range of criticism communicative language teaching (CLT) has been broadly accepted as the appropriate approach to language teaching. This paper argues that large shifts in language pedagogy firstly from 'structure' to 'meaning' and more recently from progressivism to critical pedagogy need to be tempered by a restatement of the importance of linguistics to language teaching. Ten characteristics of CLT are presented and then explored from a linguistic point of view. Throughout, explicit connections are made between cutting-edge linguistic research and questions of language pedagogy within the CLT paradigm. The conclusion is a call for a renewed focus on the understanding of language for language teaching expertise.