What is communicative?
Jeremy Harmer
The term 'communicative' has been used to cover a wide variety of approaches and methodological procedures. But it cannot account for both drills on the one hand and genuinely communicative activities on the other. In this article the word 'communicative´ and the nature of communication are examined and a distinction is drawn between 'communicative' and 'non-communicative' activities, each of which has its place in a balanced approach to language teaching.

The meaning of 'communicative'
Everything is 'communicative' these days. Published courses almost exclusively advertise themselves as being the latest in 'communicative methodology', and as having 'communication' as their main aim. Convention papers deal with the 'communicative use' of language, and the teaching of English as communication has changed from the title of an important article in an earlier issue of ELT Journal (Widdowson 1972) into a received truth of the English language teaching profession. No self-respecting teacher, materials designer, or applied linguist would think of teaching English as anything else.

The teacher, however, might be excused the obvious confusion he or she will feel when faced with the many different types of activity that are apparently communicative, since they range from drills to simulations, from dialogues to communication games. Johnson (1980a) shows how drills can be made communicative, and with Morrow (1979) uses the concept of an information gap to create conditions for this. Byrne (1979: Chapter 5) gives examples of written 'communication tasks' and Littlewood (1981) calls the reconstructing of story sequences (where four students have four different pictures which they use to create a story without showing those pictures to each other) a 'functional communication activity'. Abbs and Freebairn (1980a) say that their approach is communicative' in their textbook Developing Strategies, and Geddes and McAlpin (1978) list a number of communication games.

The fact remains, though, that no description of what 'communicative' really means can possibly embrace the drill and the discussion. It cannot satisfactorily include a controlled information gap exercise (where one grammatical pattern is being repeatedly practised) and the language use that occurs when students reconstruct story sequences. We cannot say that a controlled response drill is in the same class as a 'describe and draw' game (see Geddes and McAlpin 1978). Students are asked to do very different things in these activities, so that drills and discussions, for example, have exactly opposite characteristics, as do controlled information gap exercises and 'describe and draw' games.

One of the causes of confusion has been, perhaps, the idea that teaching is either communicative or it isn't; that it is, in a sense, all or nothing. Certainly both Brumfit (1978) and Johnson (1980b) seem to be searching for a communicative methodology described by Johnson as 'the Deep End Strategy', where students are put into a communicative situation (thrown in at the 'deep end') as a prelude to any instruction: all subsequent teaching is based on whether they sink or swim. But the mistake of searching for a communicative methodology is perhaps to suppose that the end and the means of arriving there are necessarily the same.1 Despite various claims for various methods, we do not know how or why people learn languages, nor can we say with any absolute certainty which techniques are more or less successful. Students can learn to communicate in many different ways and as a result of many different techniques. Few would deny, for example, the usefulness of formal grammatical study, but no-one would claim that therein lies the secret of language learning. Choral repetition is a technique that is still widely used (and still appreciated by many beginning students), but we would find it difficult to fit it into an exclusively communicative methodology. Good simulations may well meet a desire for communicative learning, but a controlled dialogue involving the functions of asking for and giving opinions, for example, can hardly be called communicative if students are only asked to apply an identical formula to different information. There is, after all, nothing especially communicative about teaching functions! All these techniques may well have a place in the EFL classroom, but the suggestion that there is a communicative methodology cannot account for their different characteristics.