ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to summarise the principles that underpin the communicative approach in general and the use of authentic texts as a main source of target language input in particular. Although the communicative approach did not arise directly from language acquisition research, we shall see that in its fundamentals it coincides closely with the findings of that research. We shall also see that the increasingly central role that authentic texts have come to occupy in communicative language teaching methodology can be justified as much in terms of language acquisition research findings as in terms of basic communicative principles.
