CHAPTER 2. Communicative Language Teaching 31 more creative language use may increasingly be introduced in the program (RousseMalpat & Verspoor, 2018). is initial strong focus on imitation and routinization is di erent from the behavioristic pattern-drills in the audio-lingual method, as FUMMs are introduced and used in a coherent and meaningful context instead of a structural context (Arnott, 2011). From these prerequisites, it follows that a DUB approach is very much in line with the 10 observations for e ective L2 learning presented in Table 2 and, when implemented in the classroom. would create a strong version of a CLT approach. It also aligns with earlier proposals by, for example, Lewis (1993) and Schmitt and Schmitt (2000), which focused on the lexicon and multi-word sequences as the foundation of language rather than grammar. And, nally, it is very much in line with Long’s (2000) advocacy of “focus on form”, which involves brie y drawing students’ attention to di erent linguistic elements such as words, collocations, grammatical structures, pragmatic patterns, and so on, but always in context, and only as they arise incidentally in lessons in which the overriding focus is on meaning or communication. SUMMARY: A STRUCTURE-BASED BIAS IN SLA RESEARCH AND FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING Even though most applied linguists would endorse a strong CLT version based on theoretical insights related to optimal second language development, what can be witnessed in actual classroom practice is typically still a weaker version of CLT. One of the reasons, may be that when CLT considerations for SLA classroom practice took o , the most widely accepted linguistic theories at the time were still structure-based, which presuppose that language is primarily rule driven, especially with regard to syntax and morphology. Much L1 and L2 research has therefore also focused on the acquisition of these rules and may have inadvertently frustrated the e orts of L2 teachers to integrate strong versions of CLT into their classroom practice (see also Dornyei, 2009, cited previously). Secondly, the nature of SLA research itself, which needs to be scienti c and replicable, has been dominated by short-term interventions in laboratory-type studies to control for as many variables as possible, but lack ecological validity and may not be applicable to actual classroom situations (Hulstijn, 1997; DeKeyser & Botano, 2019). Finally, educational publishers have developed a huge number of integrated coursebooks, which claim to be communicative in the sense that all four skills are targeted (Richards, 2006, p.45) but o ered the weak version of CLT. ese ready-to-use coursebooks, which have reduced the teachers’ workload signi cantly (Dörnyei, 2009, see above), became so popular that they received the status of curriculum (Dubin & Olshtain, 1986).
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