THE COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING REVOLUTION TESTED - A COMPARISON OF 2 CLASSROOM STUDIES - 1976 AND 1993

The purpose of this study was to measure empirically whether beginning FL classes are more communicative now than they were 17 years ago. Tw o sets of classroom observations, which form the basis of the study, w ere designed to observe the types and amounts of speaking activities i n which beginning foreign language students engage, in order to determ ine how and to what extent students practice the language artificially in drills and other forms of pseudocommunication, and how and to what extent they use the foreign language as a real means of communication . The results of the 1993 investigation were then compared with data f rom a similar study completed in 1976, so that change in classroom spe aking activities over the past 17 years could be measured. Using on ob servation tool which divided talk on a scale of least selection by the speaker as in repetition drills to total selection such as in free ex pression-or ''real communication'' (RLC), as it is called in this stud y-the results indicate an increase in RLC for both students and teache rs, and a shift toward L2 as the language of instruction.