Other Communicative Approaches

The communicative method known as Content-Based Instruction came to prominence via the Canadian bilingual programmes of the 1970s. Content-Based Instruction involves teaching school subjects in the target language. It proved to be very successful but Canadian academic Merrill Swain noted that students still made errors, and this led to the development of her Output Hypothesis which asserted that output was necessary for acquisition. A criticism of Swain’s hypothesis is that while she posited three main functions of output, none of them involve the presentation of correct language forms to learners. Another well-known interpretation of CLT is Task-Based Instruction. A task is a meaning-focused activity with a clear goal where students are free to choose the language they wish to use. Early advocates believed that performance of a task was the only necessary condition for language learning, but more recent versions consider that focus on form is needed to promote acquisition. While advocates (such as Jane Willis and David Nunan) agree that a task should be preceded by schema building activities including eliciting vocabulary, they are unable to agree on whether focus on form should take place at the beginning of a task or after it is completed.