Editing Communicative language teaching (section)

=== Societal influences ===
The rise of CLT in the 1970s and the early 1980s was partly in response to the lack of success with traditional language teaching methods{{fact|date=March 2024}}<!--How exactly was there 'lack of success'? It's not as if people hadn't succeeded in learning the languages they studied during all the decades and centuries in which grammar-translation was the standard approach.--> and partly by 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 number of people who needed to learn a foreign language for work or personal reasons. Meanwhile, 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, with foreign-language study no longer 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 of the elite [[grammar schools]], greatly increased the demand for language learning.<ref name=":0" />

The 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 the language. Those methods assumed that students aimed to master the target language and were willing to study for years before expecting to use the language in real life. However, those assumptions were challenged by adult learners, who were busy with work, and by schoolchildren who were less academically gifted and so could not devote years to learning before they could use the language. Educators realized that to motivate those students an approach with a more immediate reward was necessary,<ref name=":0">{{Cite book|title=Communicative Language Teaching in Practice|last=Mitchell|first=Rosamond|publisher=Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research|year=1988|isbn=978-0-948003-87-5|location=Great Britain|pages=23–24, 64–68}}</ref> and they began to use CLT, an approach that emphasizes communicative ability and yielded better results.<ref>Richards, Jack C. ''Communicative language teaching today''. SEAMEO Regional Language Centre, 2005.</ref>{{page needed|date=March 2024}}{{clarify|date=March 2024}}<!--How exactly were the 'better results' established?-->