ELT Journal Advance Access published October 8, 2015
Review
The Principled Communicative Approach: Seven Criteria
for Success
J. Arnold, Z. Dörnyei, and C. Pugliese
Helbling Languages 2015, 148 pp., £21.25
isbn 978 3 85272 938 1
First of all, it needs to be said that the book under
review is an activities book, and should therefore
be judged as such, that is to say, on the originality,
plausibility, and generalizability of its activities. On
the whole, it scores well, and teachers will welcome
the clear, no-nonsense presentation and the variety of
activity types, even if some of these seem overfamiliar,
while others verge on the implausible. At the familiar
end of the scale, for instance, is 4.2 ‘What has
been done?’ where learners use the passive voice
to describe what has changed in a sequence of two
pictures. Or 3.5 ‘Is there anybody who …?’, which
is basically a variant of that iconic communicative
activity, ‘Find someone who …’. At the implausible
end, there is 5.5 ‘Rating chunks’, where learners are
asked to rate multi-word items not only according to
their utility but according to their perceived colour,
size, strength, and beauty. On the other hand, many of
the activities are original, most would be generalizable
to a range of contexts, and some are just plain fun.
I really liked 6.9 ‘I hear you’, for example, which
practises the skill of active listening, and 6.4 ‘Log in’,
where learners are shown how to keep a record of
their extra-curricular reading.
What, though, is the glue that binds these somewhat
disparate activities together? The clue, of course, is to
be found in the title: they are communicative. But not
your common-or-garden communicative, i.e. meaning-
focused and fluency-oriented, but communicative
in a principled way, undergirded as they are by seven
principles—or pillars, even—of psycholinguistic
wisdom.
It should be unremarkable that a resource book is
‘principled’ and that it is committed to principles
that have been extrapolated from research into
ELT Journal
© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.
second language acquisition. Nevertheless, there is
a tendency in the discourse on teaching to appeal
to personal experience (‘this worked for me’) rather
than to empirically grounded principles (‘this
works because …’), so a book that so firmly nails its
(theoretical) colours to the (pedagogical) mast is to
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be welcomed.
The principles themselves have already been laid
out by one of the co-authors in a scholarly book, The
Psychology of Second Language Acquisition (Dörnyei
2009). They are not only revisited in the Introduction
to the book under review, but form the structure
around which the activities themselves are grouped.
Chapter 1, for example, is dedicated to ‘the personal
significance principle’, Chapter 2 to ‘the declarative
input principle’, and so on. Unsurprisingly, the
aforementioned ‘Rating chunks’ activity adheres
to ‘the formulaic language principle’, while ‘Log in’
supports ‘the language exposure principle’.
Does this structure cohere? More importantly: are
these principles coherent? Let’s look at the second
question first.
It is now something of a truism to state that
Communicative Language Teaching (hereafter CLT) was
originally nourished, not by a theory of learning, but by
a theory of language, or, more accurately, a theory of
language use. In the absence of a great deal of evidence
as to how languages were learnt, early proponents
of CLT focused on how they were used, and hence
were attracted to the notion of experiential learning,
invoking, as the authors of this book note, the ‘rather
vague tenet of learning through doing’ (p. 7, emphasis in
original). That is to say, you learn to speak by speaking
and to be communicative by communicating.
To counteract this hands-off, deep-end, experiential
approach and to redress the worst excesses of
CLT, the authors offer an alternative, ‘a fresh take’,
according to the blurb, a ‘proposal for reform’,
according to the Introduction (p. 5). This, then, is no
mere recipe book: it aspires to be an approach. Or
counter-approach, even.
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As such, its authors subscribe to what Ellis (2008)
calls the ‘strong interface position’, one in which
‘explicit knowledge converts to implicit knowledge
through practice’ (p. 420). That is to say, not
learning through doing, but learning then doing. The
authors insist that ‘the most effective method tends
not to throw learners into the deep water’ (p. 33).
Accordingly, they draw on cognitive skill-learning
theory, which is ‘very clear about the necessity of the
initial encoding of a targeted skill, prior to any practice
sessions, in the form of declarative knowledge’ (p. 33).
They thus align themselves with a long tradition of
what might be called CLT revisionism, which effectively
rehabilitates a presentation–production–practice
(PPP) methodology by arguing that fluency is achieved
when declarative knowledge is proceduralized through
practice, a position that dates at least as far back as
McLaughlin (1987), somewhat belying the claim that
this is a ‘new principled approach’ (p. 10) or a ‘fresh
take’. Indeed, Dörnyei himself (along with two of his
colleagues) was heralding just such a paradigm shift
nearly two decades ago (Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, and
Thurrell 1997). At this time, so they claimed, ‘CLT [had]
arrived at a turning point: Explicit, direct elements
are gaining significance in teaching communicative
abilities and skills. The emerging new approach can be
described as a principled communicative approach’
(p. 147, emphasis in original). Why, after so much time,
one wonders, is a ‘proposal for reform’ still necessary?
Admittedly, the renewed interest in content-based
approaches and various forms of immersion
(for example CLIL) has revived the debate as to
how a focus on both form and meaning can be
‘counterbalanced’ (see Lyster 2007). In this sense,
this book might serve as a useful corrective. But an
exclusive focus on meaning and fluency is, arguably,
not common practice, and to claim that ‘many
followers of CLT have tended to associate the method
with a basically “no grammar” or at least “not a lot
of grammar” approach’ (p. 7) or that ‘the natural
inclination of most CLT practitioners has been to
downplay the significance of … controlled practice’
(p. 51) is debatable, to say the least. The
many (admittedly small-scale) studies of the
implementation of CLT in classrooms suggest that its
principles are more honoured in the breach than in the
observance. Karavas-Doukas (1996: 193), for example,
found that 40 secondary school language teachers in
Greece generally held favourable attitudes towards
CLT, but, ‘when the teachers were observed, classroom
practices (with very few exceptions) deviated
considerably from the principles of the communicative
approach. […] Most lessons were teacher-fronted
and exhibited an explicit focus on form’. A glance
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at the current top-selling coursebooks should allay
all doubts, characterized as they are by ‘an overall
focus on language work, with a communicative gloss
… despite the widespread criticisms of all forms of
PPP in the professional literature in recent years’
(Waters 2011: 311). If one were to sum up the current
orthodoxy, one would not need to look much further
than Ellis’s (op.cit.) formulation above: ‘Explicit
knowledge converts to implicit knowledge through
practice’.
Be that as it may, how well do the activities map on to
the seven-pillared structure? As a writer on grammar
teaching techniques, I was naturally drawn first to
the ‘declarative input principle’ and its premise
that a principled communicative approach ‘should
contain explicit initial input components’, presumably
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including grammar items. The authors are flexible
as to whether deductive or inductive approaches to
grammar teaching should be preferred, ‘as long as
by the end of it students have been presented with a
combination of abstract rules and concrete examples’
(p. 33, emphasis in original). Nevertheless, there
is not a lot of guidance as to how these ‘abstract
rules’ should be divulged, apart from rather vague
instructions of the type: ‘Explain that in English some
adjectives have two forms …’, ‘Teach or review the
expressions below …’, ‘Review the comparative forms
with your students …’.
Perhaps the chapter dedicated to the ‘focus-on-form
principle’ would provide some clues. It claims, after
all, to offer ‘a new type of grammar teaching’ (p. 67).
But again, many of the activities begin in the same
fashion: ‘Present or review the basic information
about relative clauses …’, ‘Review the formation
and use of the passive voice …’, ‘Teach or review
the structure as … as to express equality…’. For an
approach that is committed to both a ‘declarative
input principle’ and a focus on form, one might expect
a little more guidance.
To be fair, there are one or two activities that adopt
a more reactive approach, where, for example,
learners solicit feedback on selected features of their
production (4.4 ‘Give me feedback’) or where learners’
errors are the focus of instruction (4.6 ‘No one is
perfect’). Moreover, the chapter on formulaic language
is a welcome addition to the literature on CLT, which
has so far struggled to extend the range of techniques
that target this hugely important area of language
(the exception being the excellent Teaching Chunks
of Language (Lindstromberg and Boers 2008) in the
same Resourceful Teacher series).
In sum, and as I said at the outset, this is an activities
book, and teachers will welcome it as such. And
the ‘principles’ on which the activities are based
are sound, even if the claim that they instantiate a
‘fresh take’ is somewhat exaggerated, predicated as
it is on a misreading of what constitutes the current
orthodoxy.
References
Celce-Murcia, M., Z. Dörnyei, and S. Thurrell. 1997.
‘Direct approaches in L2 instruction: a turning point in
communicative language teaching?’. TESOL Quarterly
31/1: 141–52.
Dörnyei, Z. 2009. The Psychology of Second
Language Acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Ellis, R. 2008. The Study of Second Language
Acquisition (second edition). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Karavas-Doukas, E. 1996. ‘Using attitude scales to
investigate teachers’ attitudes to the communicative
approach’. ELT Journal 50/3: 187–98.
Review
Lindstromberg, S. and F. Boers. 2008. Teaching
Chunks of Language: From Noticing to Remembering.
Innsbruck: Helbling Languages.
Lyster, R. 2007. Learning and Teaching Languages
through Content: A Counterbalanced Approach.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
McLaughlin, B. 1987. Theories of Second Language
Learning. London: Edward Arnold.
Waters, A. 2011. ‘Advances in materials design’ in
M. H. Long and C. J. Doughty (eds.). The Handbook of
Language Teaching. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
The reviewer
Scott Thornbury teaches on an MA TESOL programme
at The New School, New York. He is the author of a
number of books on language and methodology, as
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well as series editor for the Cambridge Handbooks for
Language Teachers (Cambridge University Press).
Email: scott.thornbury@gmail.com
doi:10.1093/elt/ccv057
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