English as a foreign language materials vary considerably depending on the focus of
the course. For the most part, modern commercial materials are "communicative" in that
they are designed to feature language in the context of its use. Recent innovations in
communicative materials now often include the use of language learning tasks, language
functions, video, simulation tasks, and role plays. The communicative approach contrasts
with the structuralism characteristic of the 1960'-70's which tended to feature language
structure atomized into constituent parts. The focus then was to build proficiency from the
bottom up through the use of sequential structural analysis in a "building block" manner.