Lecture 1: General problems of Foreign Language teaching

Communicative approach of language teaching
By the decade of 1970s, as we increasingly recognized the importance of the affective domain, some innovative methods took on a distinctly affective nature.
Is there a currently recognized approach that is a generally accepted norm in the field? The answer depends on whom you ask. For many (Savignon, 2005, among others) Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is an accepted paradigm with many interpretations and manifestations. For others CLT is laden with issues of “authenticity, acceptability, and adaptability”, and instead we are exhorted to embrace task-based language teaching as a more appropriate model.
Beneath those methods lay some important theoretical assumptions. In the 1940s and 1950s, the profession was to some extent convinced that teachers could behaviorally program a scientifically ordered set of linguistic structures into the minds of learners through conditioning. In the 1960s we were quite worried about how Chomsky’s generative grammar was going to fit into our language classrooms and how to inject the cognitive code of a language into the process of absorption.
All of these theoretical interests underlie what we can best describe as CTL. It is difficult to offer a definition of CTL. It is a unified but broadly based, theoretically well-informed set of tenets about the nature of language and of language learning and teaching.
Characteristics of a CLT Approach:

1. 
   Overall goals. CLT suggests a focus on all of the components (grammatical, discourse, functional, sociolinguistic, and strategic) of communicative competence. Goals therefore must intertwine the organizational (grammatical, discourse) aspects of language with the pragmatic (functional, sociolinguistic, strategic) aspects.
   
2. 
   Relationship of form and function. Language techniques are designed to engage learners in the pragmatic, authentic, functional use of language for meaningful purposes. Organizational language forms are not the central focus, but remain as important components of language that enable the learner to accomplish those purposes.
   
3.