<P> According to CLT, the goal of language education is the ability to communicate in the target language . This is in contrast to previous views in which grammatical competence was commonly given top priority . CLT also focuses on the teacher being a facilitator, rather than an instructor . Furthermore, the approach is a non-methodical system that does not use a textbook series to teach English, but rather works on developing sound oral / verbal skills prior to reading and writing . </P> <P> Language teaching was originally considered a cognitive matter, mainly involving memorization . It was later thought, instead, to be socio - cognitive, meaning that language can be learned through the process of social interaction . Today, however, the dominant technique in teaching any language is communicative language teaching (CLT). </P> <P> It was Noam Chomsky's theories in the 1960s, focusing on competence and performance in language learning, that gave rise to communicative language teaching, but the conceptual basis for CLT was laid in the 1970s by linguists Michael Halliday, who studied how language functions are expressed through grammar, and Dell Hymes, who introduced the idea of a wider communicative competence instead of Chomsky's narrower linguistic competence . The rise of CLT in the 1970s and early 1980s was partly in response to the lack of success with traditional language teaching methods and partly due to the increase in demand for language learning . In Europe, the advent of the European Common Market, an economic predecessor to the European Union, led to migration in Europe and an increased population of people who needed to learn a foreign language for work or for personal reasons . At the same time, more children were given the opportunity to learn foreign languages in school, as the number of secondary schools offering languages rose worldwide as part of a general trend of curriculum - broadening and modernization, and foreign - language study ceased to be confined to the elite academies . In Britain, the introduction of comprehensive schools, which offered foreign - language study to all children rather than to the select few in the elite grammar schools, greatly increased the demand for language learning . </P> <P> This increased demand included many learners who struggled with traditional methods such as grammar translation, which involves the direct translation of sentence after sentence as a way to learn language . These methods assumed that students were aiming for mastery of the target language, and that students were willing to study for years before expecting to use the language in real life . However, these assumptions were challenged by adult learners, who were busy with work, and some schoolchildren, who were less academically gifted, and thus could not devote years to learning before being able to use the language . Educators realized that to motivate these students an approach with a more immediate reward was necessary, and they began to use CLT, an approach that emphasizes communicative ability and yielded better results . </P>

Who started communicative language teaching movement in america