THE COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH TO THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

1. Introduction In educational theory, as with most things, there exist fashions and trends. Within the field of foreign language teaching the communicative approach is with good reason very fasharable in the west. The name certainly makes it difficult to argue with, who would want to use the ’non-communicative’ approach to teaching a foreign language? The need to communicate in a language is what makes language teaching different from teaching many other subjects. If you study geography, you learn about places, but if you only learn about a language it is not enough.