Been hearing about this approach a few times. It seems to be a mainly about how the teacher - student roles are laid out and the teacher takes the role of a counselor instead or authority figure?
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You probably mean a "comunicative" aproach in learning languages. If yes, then it means learning by chatting with others. Similar to how kids learn their native tongue by talking to their parents and mimicing them. It usually starts from basic phrases and then you slowly build up from there adding more complex structures.
Coming back to answer this myself after reading up a bit. Yes, that's the core of it. Community Language Learning was developed by Charles Curran, and it borrows from counselling: the teacher is a supportive "knower" rather than an authority.
A typical session goes like this: learners sit in a circle and say what they want to say in their own language, the teacher gives them the translation, and the learner repeats it in the target language. The conversation is often recorded, and afterwards the group goes through the transcript and looks at the language that came up.
The idea is that the learners choose the content, which lowers anxiety. Has anyone tried it in a class?
