in which the teachers have a role to organize the classroom as a setting for communication and communicative activities. In this role the teachers monitor and
encourage the students to do communicative activities, and finally give comments and corrections. However, the focuses in Communicative Language Teaching are not
on the error suppression and correction, but on the fluency and comprehensibility.
b. The Roles of Learners
In CLT the learners play the active roles. They are not only the lesson receivers but also the active class participants. Breen and Candlin 1980: 110, as
cited by Richards and Rogers 1986:77, describe the learner’s role within CLT in the following terms:
The role of learner as negotiator-between the self, the learning process, and the subject of learning-emerges from and interacts with the role of joint
negotiator within the group and within the classroom procedures and activities which the group undertakes. The implication for the learner is that he should
contribute as much as he gains, and thereby learn in an interdependent way.
Richards and Rogers state that even though there is no text, grammar rules are not presented, classroom arrangement is nonstandard, students are expected to
interact primarily with each other rather than with the teacher, and correction of errors may be absent or infrequent.
c. The Role of Instructional Materials
Instructional materials have an important role as a guideline that influences the class characteristics. Richards and Rodgers 1986:79-80 state that CLT
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practitioners view materials as a way of influencing the quality of classroom interaction and language use. Materials thus have the primary role of promoting
communicative language use. Richards and Rodgers mention three kinds of materials currently used in CLT. The first one is text-based materials, which consist of a theme,
a task analysis for thematic development, a practice situation description, a stimulus presentation, comprehension questions, and paraphrase exercises. The second one is
task-based materials, which are usually in the form of one-of-a-kind items: exercise handbooks, cue cards, activity cards, pair-communication practice materials, and
student-interaction practice booklets. In pair-communication materials, there are typically two sets of material for a pair of students, each set containing different kinds
of information. The last one is realia, which might include language-based realia, such as signs, magazines, advertisements, and newspapers, or graphic, and visual
sources around which communicative activities can be built, such as maps, pictures, symbols, graphs, and charts.
d. Communicative Competence
The main goal of Communicative Language Teaching is communicative competence: the ability to use the target language in the real life. The goal can be
gained by focusing the teaching-learning activities on how to use the target language, not only on what to understand. According to Hymes 1972, concluded by Richards
and Rodgers 1986:70, communicative competence is what a speaker needs to know in order to be communicatively competent in a speech community. Here, the students
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