CHAPTER 2. Communicative Language Teaching 27 Unfortunately, despite the advances in theoretical insights into SLA, strong CLT practices with a great deal of exposure and interaction only sparsely came to be implemented in the foreign classroom, and teachers to this day o en prefer weaker CLT versions with remnants of the older grammar-translation approach. Dörnyei (2009) gives two pragmatic reasons as to why teachers all over the world continue to adopt such approaches. Teachers rely heavily on ready-to-use textbooks, as they o er safe and easyto-implement teaching materials in situations where class sizes are predominantly large and where teachers experience a huge workload or have insu cient L2 communicative competence. Moreover, knowledge and skills that emerge from such weak CLT approaches can easily be assessed by discrete-point (multiple choice) tests (Dörnyei, 2009, p.273). In the same vein, Lightbown and Spada (2013) state that, despite the communicative intentions proclaimed by the CLT movement, language teaching all over the world can still be characterized as predominantly structure-based (SB), evidenced by modern coursebooks designed from CLT perspectives. By extension, most language teaching practices in secondary schools around the world can still be characterized as explicit and grammar based. STRUCTURE-BASED VERSUS USAGE-BASED VIEWS ON LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGE LEARNING As Long (2000) pointed out, at the time when CLT was introduced, there was no widely accepted linguistic theory that could directly support such communicative language teaching and its emphasis on exposure. From the grammar-translation method to communicative methods, the basic view of what language is, has remained structurebased. Chomskyan and structural linguistics proponents view language as a rulegoverned complex system, where “form”, “meaning” and “use” are seen as separate entities and the focus is usually on syntax and grammar, which are very much seen as the core components of language (Long, 2000). is can be illustrated on the basis of a short French narrative (with an idiomatic English translation gloss) as an example. (1) Il était une fois une maman cochonne qui avait trois petits cochons. Once upon a time there was a mama pig who had three little pigs. From a structure-based perspective, the sentence in example 1 could be broken down into major constituents and analyzed further from the syntactic to the morphological level, focusing on gender, agreement and tense. Implicit to such an approach is the consideration that a speaker builds such a sentence by applying grammatical rules while producing it and that, over time and as second language pro ciency increases, this process becomes (more) automatic. Even though SB views do not deny the existence
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