Academic influences[edit]
The development of communicative language teaching was also helped by new academic ideas. In Britain, applied linguists began to doubt the efficacy of situational language teaching, the dominant method in that country at the time. This was partly in response to Chomsky’s insights into the nature of language. Chomsky had shown that the structural theories of language prevalent at the time could not explain the creativity and variety evident in real communication.[2] In addition, British applied linguists such as Christopher Candlin and Henry Widdowson began to see that a focus on structure was also not helping language students. They saw a need for students to develop communicative skill and functional competence in addition to mastering language structures.[2]
In the United States, the linguist and anthropologist Dell Hymes developed the concept of communicative competence. This was a reaction to Chomsky’s concept of the linguistic competence of an ideal native speaker.[1] Communicative competence redefined what it meant to “know” a language; in addition to speakers having mastery over the structural elements of language, according to communicative competence they must also be able to use those structural elements appropriately in different social situations.[1] This is neatly summed up by Hymes’s statement, “There are rules of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless.”[3] Hymes did not make a concrete formulation of communicative competence, but subsequent authors have tied the concept to language teaching, notably Michael Canale.[3]