Communicative Language Teaching and Silence: Chinese (Pre-service) Teachers’ Perspectives

Communicative language teaching (CLT) remains a popular approach in English language teaching (ELT). With its focus on interaction and communication, CLT has served as a response to ‘traditional’ methods such as grammar-translation and the audio-lingual method. It emphasises the importance of communicative competence and learning to communicate for learners. While it still has its critics, and it can at times be an ambiguous concept, CLT seems to pervade many contexts and, despite its ambiguity, most teachers in the West would describe their teaching as ‘communicative’ (Larsen-Freeman & Anderson, 2011). However, when discussing CLT, the role of silence is not clear. Communication