Communicative language teaching and local needs

Few would deny that the ultimate goal of language teaching should be communicative competence. However, teachers often find this too distant a goal to aim at in the classroom, particularly where the need to use the foreign language is not felt by students to be pressing. This is the case in secondary level English language classrooms in Japan, and the definition of communicative competence as ‘linguistic competence plus an ability to use the language appropriately’ seems to need modifying if communicative competence is to remain the goal in this environment. How can the term be redefined to fit in with the overall goals of compulsory education in Japan? And how can the redefined goals be achieved in our classrooms? These are the questions which the Communicative Teaching Society, founded by us in 1977, has attempted to answer. In this article we discuss theoretical assumptions as well as the basic methodology we have arrived at, and we offer some examples of classroom language learning activities.