The Debate on Communicative Language Teaching as t...
The cliché“language is learnable，but not teachable”(Grandy，1997)is at the core of Communicative Language Teaching(CLT)，which has been widely perceived by largely the non-background Australian teachers of Chinese as“the most effective”approach to language teaching.Any teaching pedagogy or curriculum that does not involve the development of learners’“communicative competence”(Hymes，1972)would be rendered as incomplete within this line of argument.
A proliferation of research on language learning in different contexts has cemented the status of CLT as the“best method”，at least in the Australian context.This has inadvertently created a polarity between CLT and the more traditional modes of teaching such as the grammar-translation method and broadly the structural approach.An excessive focus on the learner，communication and real-life tasks could be at the expense of more structured instruction，resulting in a situation in which learners can only communicate with a minimal command of a few language terms or phrases after 150 hours of formal classroom instruction such as:Nǐhǎo.(How do you do?)Xièxie.(Thank you)and Zàijiàn(Goodbye).
Perhaps some more capable students may be able to count from 1—10 in the target language and describe or introduce their family members including pets.The top students may also have learnt a set of colour terms，talk about the weather and their likes and dislikes.But such learning outcomes remain questionable and more is desired.