Scott Thornbury - Communicative Language Teaching: 40 Years On: A Public Presentation

It is 50 years since Dell Hymes first coined the term ‘communicative competence’ and it took only another ten before the concept became the foundation of a new approach to second language teaching. Forty years on, where is the communicative approach? Are the goals of language teaching still communicative competence? If so, what happened to the idea that ‘you learn to communicate by communicating’? In this talk Scott Thornbury reviews the core concepts that inspired CLT, and traces how they were developed and then – through want of a coherent learning theory – abandoned. He will argue that it is well past time that we revisited the foundational principles of CLT and argue that there are now good grounds – including a coherent theory of learning (or two) – to rehabilitate it. Scott Thornbury (MATEFL, with distinction, University of Reading, UK), a native of New Zealand currently residing in Spain, is the series editor of the Cambridge Handbooks for Teachers series. He has been a prolific writer of book