This book is intended for teachers who are familiar with the basic techniques of teaching a foreign language and who would profit by suggestions on helping learners acquire a general communicative ability, which would enable them to cope with everyday situations. The starting point is a discussion of a communicative view of language and language learning, combining the functional view of language with the structural view and giving a description of communicative ability. Chapters 2 through 6 discuss some ways in which familiar activities, such as drills, can be adapted to help learners relate language forms more clearly to their communicative functions. These chapters present functional and social communication activities through which learners can increase their ability to convey meanings with the foreign language, and activities for developing learners' listening skills. Chapter 7 considers how a communicative approach might affect decisions about the content of a course. Finally, chapter 8 draws some threads of the discussion together and considers some more general implications of a communicative approach to foreign language teaching. (Author/AMH)