ABSTRACT
The origins of Communicative Language Teaching (henceforth CLT) can be traced back to the late 1960s and early 1970s, when several influential applied linguists, writing in journals and speaking at conferences, argued that language learners, despite their often rigorous study of language as a system (essentially grammar and vocabulary) and extensive practice in language structures (through e.g. audio-lingual language teaching), were unable to use language effectively in real-world communicative situations. Since this time, a central aspect of CLT has been how to understand the concept of communication and how it should inform language teaching. For this reason, the present chapter explores how CLT might be understood when considering communication from a number of different perspectives.
