The Communicative Approaches Revisited and the Relevance of Teaching Grammar

The field of English as a second language has gone through a number of changes in the last decades and has seen extreme adjustments throughout the methods of teaching and curriculum planning. This article finds the relevance of the old methods to the new methods. After providing the background it becomes apparent that almost all the older methods have some relevance to the contemporary classroom and linguists are reaching out and calling on teachers to use the old techniques alongside the new techniques. Emphasis in this article, however, is put on the relevance of introducing grammar to the learner, what to introduce, how and when is discussed in light what we know of the communicative.