Critiques

One of the most famous attacks on Communicative Language teaching was offered by Michael Swan in 1985 in the English Language Teaching Journal (1985 39(1):2-12, and 1985 39(2):76-87). Henry Widdowson responded in defense of CLT, also in the ELT Journal (1985 39(3):158-161). More recently other writers have critiqued CLT for paying insufficient attention to the context in which teaching and learning take place, though CLT has also been defended against this charge.