>>My preference is still for the original linguistic
anthropological framework of communicative language learning
and what that really meant.
And that meant language use.
How does a community really use language to communicate ideas?
And how do the different aspects of language contribute
to making meaning that is shared with a community?
I think that those notions, from Dell Hymes for example,
or from the Sauvignon at the very beginning adopted by people who claim 00:00:32.650 of the 70's have been adopted by people who claim
to do communicative language learning
and there were textbooks that talked
about communicative language learning ,
many of those textbooks ultimately still had a
grammatical syllabus and they merely placed a couple
of sentences or questions on there which were open ended
and that covered the communicative language learning
part, because communicative meant;
you have information I don't know,
I have information you don't know, we'll share that,
that is communicative, because we don't know what the other
people will answer, but the point was still
grammar practice.
And there was very little context
from real life language use, there was very little use
of descriptive grammar, there was very little use
of language use with all its failures
and words even among native speakers.
Everything had to be perfect; the models that were
in those textbooks where very stylized
and they use prescriptive grammar models and again mostly
to teach grammar, or a set of vocabulary items.
So what I try to use is I take authentic text
to the extent possible or if not authentic texts,
then at least plausible texts; things that would come
up possibly in everyday conversations.
So my students will probably not be able to recreate a,
buying ice cream in Germany because many
of them will not go there,
but at least they can recreate something
that could be plausible and if they should go over there,
they'll have practiced that.
But it's the whole speech event of buying ice cream,
so grammar is almost subservient to that, lexicon is subservient
to that, the sociolinguistic rules are subservient
to that, cultural knowledge,
all of it collectively creates language use
and so the focus is always what would native speakers do
with that particular language, speech events, language events
and start that as a starting point.
So language as language use and for me
that is what communicative language practice is.