ABSTRACT
The ‘communicative approach’ to foreign language teaching is by now around twenty years old. It is not a tightly structured ‘method’ of teaching, like the French audio-visual movement of the 1960s, for example, or some commercially marketed language teaching methods of today, such as ‘Suggestopedia’ or the ‘Silent Way’. Rather it is a broad assembly of ideas, from a range of sources (some linguistic, others more broadly educational), which have together come to be accepted as ‘good practice’ by many contemporary teachers.
