From the mid-1970s onwards, a more cognitive-oriented approach to foreign language teaching became the new standard in language teaching in many parts of the world (Richards & Rodgers, 2014). This Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach addressed the functional and communicative potential of language. It was not only an answer to the growing need of focusing on communicative proficiency rather than on mere mastery of structures, as advocated by British scholars like Christopher Candlin and Henry Widdowson (Richards & Rodgers, 2014), but was also seen as an answer to the need for a necessary tool for communication and intercultural awareness in an emerging European Union, where the Council of Europe placed language teaching high on its agenda.
However, in the late 90's, Long (2000) already pointed out that CLT course books still struggled with "the thorny issue of grammar in the communicative classroom" (p. 35). To this day, foreign language teaching practice at secondary level mostly continues to build on course books, which consistently use the label 'communicative' in their approach and claim to follow CLT principles but do contain a strong language focus section in each chapter, explicitly using drills to familiarize learners with grammatical structures (cf., Ellis, 2009; Gómez-Rodriguez, 2010; Burns & Hill, 2013). That is not to say that current foreign language teaching approaches do not also focus on communicative skills and practices, but the question is what their main focus is. Howatt (1984) characterizes CLT practices as broadly falling in one of two categories on a continuum: On one end of this continuum, structural control is necessary to develop communicative competence (the weak version) and on the other end using language is necessary to develop language knowledge (the strong version).
This paper presents and compares the results of two instructional programs of L2 French in the Netherlands after 6 years of secondary school and focusses on speaking skills. The first program, commonly used in the Netherlands can be termed a "weak" version of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) and is based on a structure-based (SB) view of language with a great deal of attention to grammatical accuracy, often explained through the medium of the L1. The second program can be considered a "strong" CLT program that is in line with so-called dynamic usage-based (DUB) principles, in which exposure to and active use of the target language is key, and no explicit attention is paid to grammar.
The current paper will provide empirical evidence that a "strong" CLT program is indeed warranted to promote speaking skills. Before discussing the actual study, we discuss the underlying linguistic theories of the SB and DUB approaches and the dearth of long-term classroom studies that test speaking skills with free response data.
