Lang. Teach. (2014), 47.

3, 349–362 
c Cambridge University Press 2012
doi:10.1017/S0261444812000134 First published online 12 April 2012

Communication-oriented language teaching: Where are we now?

Where do we go from here?

William Littlewood Hong Kong Baptist University

wlittlewood9@[Link]

In its early days, CLT was widely promoted as suitable for all contexts, but many questions
have since been raised about what it really means and what versions of it (if any) are suited to
specific learning situations. Experiences in Asia, where educational traditions and current
realities often contrast strongly with those where CLT originated, have provided a major
impetus for this questioning and the process has been reinforced by developments in the
wider context, such as the postmethod perspective in language teaching and the decline of
centre-to-periphery conceptions of modernization. CLT now serves not so much as a label for
a specific approach as an umbrella term to describe all approaches that aim to develop
communicative competence in personally meaningful ways. It also provides a framework for
defining issues that research and exploratory practice need to address in the years ahead.

1. Introduction

Communicative language teaching (CLT) is now some 40 years old. Will it conform to the
old saying that ‘life begins at 40’? Or have we now reached, as Bax (2003) argues, ‘the end
of CLT’? There is no lack of arguments on both sides. Over the years CLT has led us to
address a lot of important issues and opened up a lot of opportunities, which we can now
take further. But it has also created a lot of problems and dilemmas, both theoretical and
practical. This paper aims to take stock of this situation by looking at where these 40 years
of experience have left us and, above all, where we go from here. It does this by asking three
main questions:

• Where have we come from with CLT?

• Where are we now with CLT?
• Where do we go from here?

Especially in the last two decades, much discussion about teaching language for
communication has referred to ‘task-based language teaching’ (TBLT) rather than CLT.

Revised version of a plenary paper presented on 29 July 2011 at the Ninth Asia TEFL Conference held in Seoul, South
Korea.

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 350 PLENARY SPEECHES

In this paper, as in, for example, Nunan (2004: 10) and Richards (2005: 29), TBLT is viewed
as a development within CLT, in which communicative ‘tasks’ have special roles and special
prominence as a focus for planning, learning and teaching. Some specific contributions of
TBLT are clearly presented by Norris (2009).

2. Where have we come from with CLT?

2.1 What IS CLT?

Since the early 1970s CLT has figured large in discussions of foreign language teaching.
Hunter & Smith (2012), in an enlightening analysis of the common keywords in articles
published in one UK-based journal (ELT Journal), show how by the period 1981–1986,
‘communicative’ ideas and terminology had gradually climbed to a dominant status in ELT
professional discourse. At the same time Hunter & Smith’s analysis also refutes any idea
that there was a general consensus at that time concerning the nature of a communicative
approach and that there was a ‘unitary’ CLT in the 1980s. This lack of consensus has been
confirmed in the years since then. Some twenty years later, Harmer (2003: 289) still writes
that ‘the term [CLT] has always meant a multitude of different things to different people’
and Spada (2007: 272) begins her survey article on CLT with the comment that the meaning
of CLT ‘seems to depend on whom you ask’. Hall (2011: 93) expresses similar views.
Uncertainty in the realm of principles carries itself over (with much more disorienting
implications) into the realm of classroom practice. For example, the ten teachers of Japanese
in Australia who were observed and interviewed by Sato & Kleinsasser (1999: 501) saw
themselves as adopting a communicative approach but ‘held varying, even fragmented,
views’ about what that meant. The most common conceptions were that it meant learning
to communicate in the L2, focusing mainly on speaking and listening, teaching very little
grammar and spending a lot of time preparing activities. In their actual practice, however,
the teachers ‘were rarely guided by their conceptions of CLT’ (p. 510) and mainly adopted
a teacher-fronted approach with little interaction amongst students. Likewise in East Asia,
according to Ho & Wong’s (2004: xxxiv) summary of fifteen national surveys, CLT has been
implemented in various ways ‘with the term almost meaning different things to different
English teachers’. The most common understanding has been that it means teachers including
communicative activities in their repertoire and giving learners opportunities to practise the
language skills taught (Ho 2004: 26). Thompson (1996) surveyed teachers from a range of
countries and found conceptions similar to those of the teachers in Australia: that CLT means
using pair or group work, teaching only speaking, not teaching grammar, and a lot of hard
work for the teacher.

2.2 CLT’s dual identity

One source of uncertainty about the meaning of CLT is that from the outset, it has existed
in two different versions. These versions correspond roughly to two main sources of CLT

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 WILLIAM LITTLEWOOD: CLT: WHERE ARE WE NOW? 351

that became prominent in the 1970s: a communicative perspective on LANGUAGE and a

communicative perspective on LEARNING.
The communicative perspective on language is primarily about WHAT we learn. It proposes
that when we learn a language we are primarily learning not language structures but language
FUNCTIONS (how to ‘do things with words’). These communicative functions came to play
a central role in syllabus design (Wilkins 1976) and methodology (Widdowson 1978). The
ELT world (especially the part influenced by the UK) came to be dominated by so-called
‘functional’ or ‘communicative’ courses, in which students would practise expressing functions
(such as ‘making suggestions’) and then use them in ‘communicative activities’ (such as pair
work, role-play, discussion and the use of authentic materials; see, for example, the course
book by Abbs, Ayton & Freebairn 1975 and activities discussed in Johnson & Morrow 1981).
As Morrow & Johnson (1983: 4) put it in a book of papers from a seminal conference that
they organized in 1978, in those days ‘functional syllabuses seemed to offer an automatic
solution to all the problems of language teaching’.
At about the same time, the communicative perspective on learning focused attention on
HOW we learn and especially on our natural capacities to ‘acquire’ language (both L1 and
L2) simply through communication and without the direct help of a teacher. These ideas
were embodied in proposals such as Krashen & Terrell’s (1983) ‘natural approach’, which
was based on the belief that only natural acquisition processes can lead to effective language
learning; Prabhu’s (1987) ‘communicational language teaching’, which insisted that conscious
learning and error correction have no place in the language classroom; and ‘humanistic’
approaches (e.g. Moskowitz 1978), which emphasized the importance of engaging learners
in communication in which their whole personality is invested.
‘Communication in the classroom’ (the title of an influential book edited by Johnson
& Morrow 1981) was the practical implication of both perspectives. But if we focus only
on the communicative perspective on LEARNING, we may draw the conclusion (as many
have done) that involvement in communication is sufficient in itself for learning and that
we should not make any use at all of ‘traditional’ techniques such as explanations, drills
or question-and-answer practice. This has often been called (after Howatt 1984: 287)
the ‘strong’ version of CLT. The communicative perspective on LANGUAGE, on the other
hand, still leaves open the possibility that teachers might present and practise individual
items (in a communicative context) before or after students use them for communication.
This has often been called (again, after Howatt 1984: 287) the ‘weak’ version of
CLT.
These two versions of CLT have very different implications for how language is best
learnt in the classroom and for the role of the teacher. Both versions require the teacher to
be a creator and organizer of communicative activities – a requirement that presents new
roles for teachers and learners in traditional classrooms – but the weak version presents a
more familiar overall framework through its recognition of controlled and analytic learning.
Allwright & Hanks (2009: 47−49) offer an interesting perspective on how the ‘much less
challenging ideas’ of this weak version (which they see embodied in Littlewood 1981) ‘solved
the commodity problem’ because it could form the basis of published course books. However,
they argue that it hindered the ‘radical rethink about learners’ that the strong version might
have stimulated, if it had been commercially viable.

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2.3 CLT in the classroom

For many years, confidence in the new communicative approach seemed to know no limits.
From its origins in what Holliday (1994) termed ‘BANA’ (British – American – New Zealand –
Australian) classrooms for adult learners, it was quickly exported to other countries which
needed to cope with an urgent need for competent communicators in English. In these
countries it would become the official policy for teaching at all levels and in all contexts.
The surveys by Nunan (2003) and Ho & Wong (2004) show how CLT became the dominant
model for official language teaching policies and a central pillar of government rhetoric in
(respectively) the Asia-Pacific region and East Asia.
Changes in policy and rhetoric are of course easy to formulate, but the practical challenges
which they entail are often more problematic. Some of the challenges which the change to
a communication-oriented approach has presented to teachers in traditional classrooms
are summarized by Wang (2007: 10). She writes about China, but her comments are
also mirrored in accounts from other countries. Within a short period, teachers have been
expected to develop new practical skills for classroom teaching, change how they evaluate
students, develop the ability to adapt textbooks, use modern technology and improve their
own language proficiency. To implement these new practical demands, they have had to
make major changes in attitude and approach: to change their conception of their own role
from that of a transmitter of knowledge to that of a multi-role educator, and to change their
conception of language learning from one based on knowledge acquisition to one based on
the holistic development of competence.
There are numerous reports, from a range of countries, of the practical problems that
teachers in primary and secondary schools have encountered in implementing CLT, especially
with large classes and limited resources (e.g. Li 1998 and Jeon 2009 in South Korea; Carless
2004 in Hong Kong; Hu 2005 in China; Hiep 2007 in Vietnam; Nishino & Watanabe 2008
in Japan; Orafi & Borg 2009 in Libya; see also surveys of a range of East Asian countries in Ho
& Wong 2004, Littlewood 2007 and Butler 2011). The reported problems relate especially
to the domain of communicative activities (or ‘tasks’), in which students exchange messages
with the teacher or with each other, and include:

• Classroom management is demanding, especially with large classes, and teachers may fear
losing control.
• Unpredictable communication may make excessive demands on the language skills of
teachers who themselves have had limited experience of communicating in English.
• Pair or group work requires teachers to develop new organizational skills and adopt a less
overtly dominant role in the classroom.
• In such work, without constant monitoring, students may communicate in the mother
tongue or use only minimal English, rather than extending their English competence.
• The holistic learning that occurs in communicative activity contradicts common
conceptions of school-based learning as involving item-by-item progression through a
syllabus.
• These conceptions also support the traditional view of teachers as transmitters of
knowledge rather than as facilitators who try to develop learner independence.

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 WILLIAM LITTLEWOOD: CLT: WHERE ARE WE NOW? 353

• Teachers often face a contradiction between an official public policy which advocates CLT
and a pencil-and-paper examination system which tests discrete items.
• As a result, they often face resistance both from students and from parents, for whom
examination results are understandably of paramount importance.

Butler (2011: 36) classifies the challenges which face teachers into ‘(a) conceptual constraints
(e.g., conflicts with local values and misconceptions regarding CLT/TBLT); (b) classroom-
level constraints (e.g., various student and teacher-related factors, classroom management
practices, and resource availability); and (c) societal-institutional level constraints (e.g.,
curricula and examination systems)’. Jeon (2009) finds a similar pattern in the issues identified
by Korean teachers (smaller classes, more training and more supplementary materials were
the most important) and also proposes specific ways of addressing them.

3. Where are we now with CLT?

Since the early euphoria that surrounded CLT, experiences such as those described have
brought a more sober assessment. In East Asia, in the words of Ho & Wong (2004: xxxiv), ‘there
has been much criticism of an unquestioning acceptance of CLT techniques’. Hiep (2007:
196) believes that teachers in many parts of the world reject ‘CLT techniques transferred
from the West’ and Hu (2005: 67) also advises that we should not try to impose CLT on
teachers but should ‘encourage them to adopt an eclectic approach. . .to meet the demands
of their specific teaching situations’. Bax (2003) announces ‘the end of CLT’ and advocates
a ‘context approach’ in which the first priority is to analyse the context before deciding on a
teaching approach.
Richards & Rodgers (2001: 173) point out that many of the characteristics usually ascribed
to CLT ‘address very general aspects of language learning and teaching that are now largely
accepted as self-evident and axiomatic throughout the profession’. Harmer (2007: 70) adopts
a similarly broad perspective when he suggests that CLT now functions as ‘a generalized
“umbrella” term to describe learning sequences which aim to improve the students’ ability
to communicate’ in contrast to ‘teaching which is aimed more at learning bits of language
just because they exist – without focusing on their use in communication’. Hiep (2007: 196)
formulates what he calls ‘the spirit of CLT’ in terms compatible with Harmer’s: CLT ‘proposes
a focus on learning’, ‘holds that learning is likely to happen when classroom practices are
made real and meaningful to learners’ and ‘sets the goal of language learning to be the
teaching of learners to be able to use the language effectively for their real communicative
needs’.
These and other accounts, together with experiences such as those mentioned in the
previous section, indicate that as a ready-made package of ideas and classroom techniques
which can be applied anywhere, CLT has now experienced the same fate as the proclaimed
‘best methods’ of the past. However, it still provides a conceptual framework centred on the
need to orient our teaching towards learners’ communicative goals and to design meaningful
experiences which lead towards these goals. Also, the specific ideas and techniques that it has

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generated have enriched the repertoire that teachers can draw on as they develop their own
context-sensitive pedagogy.

4. Where do we go from here?

From a logical perspective there would appear to be four main strategies for language teachers
to adopt. They form a cline, overlapping and merging into each other. One approach is to
simply aim to adopt CLT as faithfully as possible in whatever form is advocated by the local
educational policy. This is the case when teachers evaluate aspects of their practice according
to whether they are ‘really’ doing CLT rather than whether they contribute to successful
learning. Some of the teachers in Sato & Kleinsasser (1999) spoke in these terms. The second
is to retain CLT as a reference framework but adapt it as appropriate to suit specific contexts.
Thus Carless (2004) and Mitchell & Lee (2003) describe how teachers in Hong Kong, South
Korea and the UK may reinterpret communicative tasks as ‘contextualized practice’ or
‘teacher-led interaction’ rather than activities in which learners negotiate meaning with each
other. In the third approach, teachers may retain their traditional approach as a pedagogical
framework but integrate elements of CLT into it. This is the strategy of the Chinese teacher
in Zheng & Adamson (2003). He retains his familiar role as a knowledge transmitter and
includes traditional techniques such as grammatical explanations, memorization techniques
and pattern drills. However, he integrates new ideas by including more interaction, eliciting
more creative responses from the students in his classes, and contextualizing these not only
in situations provided by the textbook but also in the students’ personal experience. Finally,
teachers may break free altogether from concepts such as ‘traditional’ and ‘CLT’. They
choose ideas and techniques from the universal, transnational pool that has been built up
over the years and evaluate them, not in relation to any notion of CLT, but according to how
well, in their own specific context, they contribute to creating meaningful experiences which
lead towards communicative competence.
With this fourth perspective, the notion that CLT is a distinct methodology disappears.
Ideas and techniques from whatever source – so-called traditional, so-called CLT, or indeed
any other source – constitute a common pool on which teachers can draw in order to
design classroom practices which are real and meaningful to their learners and help learners
towards fulfilling their real communicative needs. This aligns with the suggestion of Beaumont
& Chang (2011: 291) that the CLT/traditional dichotomy may ‘inhibit methodological
development’ and it is better to define learning activities in terms of their learning outcomes
and their ‘potential to make a contribution to the general goal of learning a language, i.e.
successful communication’ (p. 298). It is also consistent with the views reported above that
CLT now functions mainly as an ‘umbrella term’ for learning sequences that lead towards
communication (Harmer 2007: 70) and that what is now essential is not any specific set of
ideas and techniques but ‘the spirit of CLT’ (Hiep 2007: 196).
One may go further and question whether it is now useful to use the term ‘CLT’ at all,
particularly since, as we saw in section 2, it is not only ambiguous but also often carries
the misleading message that there is some real and proven version of CLT to which a
teacher should try to conform, even if his or her intuitions say otherwise. In an earlier paper

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 WILLIAM LITTLEWOOD: CLT: WHERE ARE WE NOW? 355

(Littlewood 2004: 325), I proposed ‘communication-oriented language teaching’ (‘COLT’)

as an alternative term, which is uncontroversial about the goals of teaching (successful
communication) but implies more flexibility regarding the means (which will vary with
context). That is the term that will be used in the final section of this paper.

5. Communication-oriented language teaching (COLT): Some issues and challenges

for its future

In this section I will suggest five areas in which research and exploration may contribute in
important ways to developing firmer foundations for COLT. There are, of course, so many
potential areas that any choice is necessarily subjective. However, the five areas have all been
the focus of extensive debate over recent years, so the subjectivity is less than it might seem.
They are all ‘macro-level’ areas which involve the development of strategies in key domains.
The first two might be called ‘meta-methodological’ (by analogy with ‘meta-cognitive’) in that
they concern the conditions in which a postmethod pedagogy might be developed. The others
focus on classroom methodology more directly and involve major concerns that permeate
all teaching. They are areas in which no teacher can avoid making decisions (conscious
or subconscious) and implementing them, on a moment-by-moment basis, through specific
‘micro-level’ strategies and techniques developed to suit his or her own teaching situation.
This micro-level exploration becomes the focus of context-specific exploration (e.g. through
action research).

5.1 Exploring principles for a ‘postmethod’ pedagogy

The many decades of debate and experimentation in the field of language teaching
methodology have left teachers with an immense range of learning activities to choose
from. Self-contained ‘methods’ such as audiolingualism and situational language teaching
came under attack but at least they offered principles for selecting from this range. In the
current ‘postmethod’ era (e.g. Kumaravadivelu 2006, Allwright & Hanks 2009, Littlewood
2011), in which no unified method provides principles to guide this selection, WHAT principles
should guide it?
One approach to this question is to start from experienced teachers’ ‘sense of plausibility’
(Prabhu 1987) and develop a ‘teacher-generated theory of classroom practice’ (Senior 2006:
270). Breen et al. (2001) followed this approach when they worked from 18 teachers’ accounts
of their own practices and their reasons for adopting them. They found reasonable consensus
on ‘a dozen’ principles, such as taking account of individual differences and making it easier
for students to remember what is taught.
Ellis (2005a, 2005b) and Erlam (2008) worked in the opposite direction, starting not
from classroom practice but from principles of second language acquisition (SLA). Based on
research into SLA, they proposed ten ‘principles of instructed language learning’: for example,
that teachers should take account of individual differences and ensure that learners develop
both a rich repertoire of formulaic expressions and a rule-based competence. After spelling

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out how each principle might be expressed in actual classroom practice, Erlam (2008) and
her co-researchers observed and interviewed teachers in New Zealand to see if their teaching
practice did in fact provide evidence to validate the principles.
A third approach is taken by Kumaradivelu (2003) and Littlewood (2004). These writers
have proposed frameworks to guide classroom practice based on accumulated classroom
experience as well as current language teaching theory. Kumaradivelu’s (2003) framework
consists of ten ‘macro-strategies’ for language teaching: for example, that teachers should
maximize learning opportunities, facilitate negotiated interaction and contextualize linguistic
input. These strategies are to be implemented through specific practices suited to the
local context. Littlewood’s (2004) five-category framework locates activities in relation to
the goal of communicative competence (non-communicative learning; pre-communicative
language practice; communicative language practice; structured communication; authentic
communication). A second dimension – task-engagement – reflects the essential role of
motivation and involvement in every category of activity. The framework has proved a useful
basis for teachers to analyse their specific practices and work towards a more communication-
oriented classroom (Deng & Carless 2009).
The first of these approaches (based on teachers’ sense of plausibility) takes teachers’
common sense and current expertise as its starting point but does not yet open up ways in
which teachers may examine this expertise and develop it with the benefit of new insights
and perspectives. The second (based on principles of SLA) offers new insights from theory
and invites teachers to use them to examine their current practice but does not in itself offer
ways to evaluate the outcomes. The third attempts to match successful shared professional
experience with theory that might illuminate its key features in order to make it generalizable
across situations. All of these approaches are complementary in exploring principles for a
postmethod pedagogy under the general umbrella of COLT.

5.2 Exploring ways of linking practice with theory and research

It is clear from the previous section that top-down approaches, in which policy-makers and
other non-teaching ‘experts’ legislate on how language is best taught, have lost their validity.
Every teacher is the best expert in his or her own situation but can draw insights from others
(theorists as well as teachers) and test them in this situation. This means that in the search
for postmethod principles and practices discussed in the previous section, it is of paramount
importance that theory, research and practice work together on a basis of equality.
Akbari (2008) emphasizes the importance of bridging this gap between the ‘community
of practice’ of language teachers and the ‘academic discourse community’ of theorists and
researchers. A major aim of Erlam’s (2008) project, mentioned above, was to make the
research relevant and accessible, as the resulting material was used for input and discussion
in seminars around the country. In this way both researchers and teachers could engage with
it, benefit from each other’s expertise and develop a shared discourse.
The final determinant of successful language teaching is, of course, not the conceptual
frameworks with which theorists and researchers work but the frameworks of theories, beliefs
and assumptions with which teachers work in their particular classrooms. An important means

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 WILLIAM LITTLEWOOD: CLT: WHERE ARE WE NOW? 357

for renewal in a postmethod pedagogy is therefore collaborative research in which teachers

and theorists/researchers work together from the outset (for example, through procedures
such as those described in Burns 2010) to identify and explore issues and problems that
require attention. But with or without the collaboration of research specialists, teaching is
itself a process of exploration: for each class, a teacher predicts the outcomes of his or her
interventions and observes the results. What we typically call ‘research’ means simply that a
person explains and justifies the predictions more explicitly, describes the interventions more
systematically and measures the results more precisely. Every teacher is in a position to take
these steps and engage in ‘exploratory practice’ (Allwright & Hanks 2009).

5.3 Exploring optimal combinations of analytic and experiential strategies

The analytic–experiential continuum is discussed at length by Stern (1992) as a key dimension

in language teaching. Some of the most significant strategic decisions that classroom teachers
have to make concern the complementary functions of analytic and experiential strategies.
This issue is at the heart of the distinction between the ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ versions of
CLT discussed above (the latter affirming that analytic learning is not necessary) and is also
central to considering the roles of accuracy-based and fluency-based activities (Brumfit 1984).
More recently, much research has addressed the role that form-focused instruction plays in
facilitating language learning and the kinds of form-focused instruction that are of most
benefit in particular circumstances (see Loewen 2011 for a recent review). For Norris (2009:
580), a major contribution of task-based language teaching is that it can consolidate analytic
ideas from a ‘focus on forms methodology’ and experiential ideas from a ‘focus on meaning
methodology’ into an ‘integrated approach’. In a similar way, the ‘communicative continuum’
mentioned above proposes a methodological framework for moving between analytic (non-
communicative and pre-communicative) activities to experiential activities (structured and
authentic communication).
These proposals are based on most teachers’ intuitions – which are also supported by
empirical evidence – that both analytic and experiential learning are important. However, the
optimal balance between different kinds of activity from the analytic–experiential continuum
remains very much an area for individual intuition. Of course this balance will always be
determined by the teacher in his or her specific context but it is also an area in which research
can seek to propose new possibilities and investigate their likely effects on learning.

5.4 Exploring ways to deepen and personalize the content of L2 communication in the
classroom

Much of the language use that occurs in the communication-oriented language classroom
does not, as a teacher interviewed by Gong & Holliday (forthcoming) puts it, ‘seem to touch
the hearts of the students’. Pennycook (1994: 311) goes so far as to write of the ‘empty babble
of the communicative language class’. This is clearly an overgeneralization, but it alerts us
to the superficial nature of much communication in COLT classrooms, in which students

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are often given a steady diet of activities like ‘planning a party’ which will never take place
or ‘giving directions to the station’ on the map of a non-existent town. Gong & Holliday
report on how students in a remote village in rural China were asked to talk about their
weekend activities through examples such as ‘go to see a movie, go to an art museum, or go
to piano lessons in a coaching school’. None of these opportunities existed in their lives and,
not surprisingly, they had nothing to talk about.
Hanauer (2012: 106) is an eloquent advocate of the need to put the ‘living, thinking,
experiencing and feeling person at the centre of the language learning process’ and ‘make
language learning a personally contextualized, meaningful activity for the learner’. The
exploration of more strategies for doing this is a key task for the future of COLT. Hanauer
himself proposes procedures for incorporating poetry writing. Gong & Holliday emphasize
the need to base tasks on content which is relevant to learners’ lives and interests and
which will help them become ‘multicultural citizens’ who can communicate about their
own and other cultures and express their own views. Other proposals include linking
language development to other subject content (Wesche & Skehan 2002), developing project
work (Legutke & Thomas 1991) and using drama techniques (Maley & Duff 1978). The
‘three generations of tasks’ described in Ribé & Vidal (1993) offer a possible framework
for deepening task engagement: the first ‘generation’ focuses only on communicative
development, the second on communicative and cognitive development and the third adds the
dimension of global personality development. Engagement may also be encouraged through
collaborative learning techniques which increase learners’ responsibility for contributing to
group interaction (McCafferty, Jacobs & DaSilva Iddings 2006; Littlewood 2009). Zhang
& Head (2010) report on a project in which a teacher was able to increase students’ sense
of personal engagement by including them in joint decision-making about the topics and
activities in their course. In the context of more controlled language use, there is a range
of techniques for personalizing practice by relating it to students’ own identity (Griffiths &
Keohane 2000). All of these proposals provide a basis for further widening the options at
teachers’ disposal.

5.5 Exploring the role of the mother tongue in the language classroom

A practical issue that almost continuously engages teachers’ decision-making in the classroom
is the role (if any) that they should accord to the students’ mother tongue. The ‘monolingual
principle’ – that only the target language should be used – has been enshrined in most of
the methodological proposals that have influenced language teaching over the last century.
In many contexts (e.g. Hong Kong and the UK) it is official policy to teach only in the target
language or at least to use the mother tongue only as a last resort. In some other contexts (e.g.
Mainland China and South Korea), teaching through the mother tongue has been accepted
practice, but official policy now urges teachers to exclude it. In spite of official demands, many
teachers are nonetheless accustomed to using the mother tongue extensively, sometimes as
much as 70% or even 90% of the time (see the review in Littlewood & Yu 2011).
The monolingual principle is now being actively questioned on a number of grounds.
Few people would disagree that, since the classroom is the only source of input for many

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 WILLIAM LITTLEWOOD: CLT: WHERE ARE WE NOW? 359

students, the overriding aim should be to establish the target language as the main medium
of communication. To achieve this aim, however, they also acknowledge that the mother
tongue can be a major resource, as it ‘launches, as it were, the pupils’ canoes into the foreign-
language current’ (Butzkamm 2003: 32). At the affective level it can provide psychological
reassurance. In term of teaching strategies, it opens up a wide range of options at all stages.
At the presentation stage, for example, it can convey meaning efficiently and enable students
to progress more quickly to the stages of internalization and active use. At the practice stage,
it can provide effective stimuli for students to use and expand their full foreign language
competence. At the production stage, it can help to create contexts where the foreign language
has a meaningful role, such as when students brainstorm ideas for a story in the security of
their mother tongue and later write it in the foreign language. In ways such as these, the
mother tongue can serve as a natural bridge between the two languages, offer a sense of
ownership over learning, and help satisfy the need to personalize communication.
Exploration of effective ways of using the mother tongue as a resource for learning whilst
establishing the foreign language as a means of communication is thus another key area in
which teachers and researchers need both to clarify essential principles and seek to widen the
repertoire of strategies in COLT.

6. Conclusion

In its early days, CLT was perceived (and marketed) by many as a new and unquestionable
orthodoxy. As a package of ideas and techniques, it was exported around the world with the
support of the full paraphernalia of the ELT industry (textbooks, advisors, training courses,
native-speaker teachers, and so on). Bax (2003: 280) writes of what he sees as the ‘CLT
attitude’ that accompanied this endeavour: ‘assume and insist that CLT is the whole and
complete solution to language learning; assume that no other method could be any good;
ignore people’s own views of who they are and what they want; neglect and ignore all aspects
of the local context as being irrelevant’. Gupta (2004) speaks of this experience from the
receiving end at a university in India.
This conception of CLT emanating from the ‘centres’ of the ELT world to outposts in
the ‘periphery’ corresponds to wider conceptions of modernization and globalization at
that time. Those processes were conceptualized mainly as unidirectional, in which ideas and
forms are transmitted from centre to periphery; ‘when the centre speaks, the periphery listens,
and mostly does not talk back’ (Hannerz 1992: 219). Gradually, however, as described by
Schuerkens (2004: 19−23), with the increase of cultural self-confidence across the world, these
centre-to-periphery conceptions of globalization and modernization have been overtaken by
ones in which all participants have a voice: ‘inflowing cultural forms and meanings’ combine
with ‘existing local forms and meanings’. Innovation and diversity reflect local conditions, as
they result from the ‘creative mixture of ‘global’ elements with local meanings and cultural
forms’. Schuerkens characterizes this as a ‘cosmopolitan conversation of humankind’ (p. 15).
The need to support this ‘creative mixture’ of global and local elements characterizes the
stage that CLT (or COLT) has now reached. In itself, the term does not refer to a single well-
defined approach but rather, in the words of Richards & Rodgers (2001: 173) quoted earlier,

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 360 PLENARY SPEECHES

to ‘very general aspects of language learning and teaching that are now largely accepted
as self-evident and axiomatic throughout the profession’. Indeed it may be anachronistic –
perhaps a legacy of the long search for a single ‘best method’ – that we feel the need for
a label at all, rather than simply talking of ‘successful language teaching’, the nature of
which will necessarily vary from context to context. But if that need exists, the most valuable
contribution of COLT in the globalized world is not to refer to a supposed ‘method’ (which
does not exist in reality in any case) but to serve as a loose conceptual framework – using the
notions of Apparudai (1996, also discussed in Holton 2005) as a transnational ‘ideoscape’,
an ideational landscape – for a truly ‘cosmopolitan conversation’ about second language
pedagogy, in which all may participate with equal rights.

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WILLIAM LITTLEWOOD taught languages at secondary schools in the UK before taking up a post in
teacher education in Swansea, Wales. He moved to Hong Kong in 1991 and has worked there since
then. He is now Honorary Professor in the Language Centre at the Hong Kong Baptist University. He
has published widely in areas related to language teaching, and his books and articles have been used
in teacher education in many countries.

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