Yes, Talking!: Organizing the Classroom to Promote Second Language Acquisition

Recent research into the processes of children's first and second language development has yielded a number of insights which have been combined to create the communicative language teaching model. This model should be useful to English as a second language (ESL) teachers, both in planning their own instruction and in advising the increasing numbers of regular classroom teachers with limited English-speaking (LES) students in their classes. This article summarizes the central assumptions of the communicative language teaching model and specifies the potential difficulties that regular classroom teachers may face in adopting it. It then presents seven criteria to be used in organizing communicative classrooms and describes specific applications of these criteria to decisions about organizing classroom interaction and the physical environment.