ABSTRACT
A spectre is haunting language teaching-Communication! Surely this must be a facile remark. Is it not true that every modern coursebook, resource pack and syllabus is devoutly communicative? There must be hundreds. Applied Linguistic research too has supplied ample evidence for the view that communication is ‘the’ key to an effective teaching methodology. With this amount of support it would be perhaps unsurprising to report success in learning languages of hitherto unknown proportions. Yet this is clearly not the case. I am not wishing to be a pessimist, but, despite the energy and enthusiasm in all things language learning at the moment, a successful method seems rather more a statement of intent than practice. Why is this so? All that glisters, it appears, is not gold. Our National Syllabus-GCSE-turns out to be a transactional wolf in a communicative sheep’s clothing. Coursebooks once heralded as the new generation now seem, after years of teaching with them, not to be so interactive after all. Why is this the case? And why, if communication is so effective as a means of learning languages, is it so elusive? In this chapter, I want to set out a brief summary of how, in methodological terms, we have arrived at the stage we are now at and try to suggest why present practice is often not as effective as we would wish. I then want to attempt to reorientate our perspective and lay down certain key principles in founding a new approach to method.
