Twenty-six learners of English enrolled in an MA course were asked to give the metaphors which they think best capture the essence of their learning experience so far. Their metaphors tell how English learning had introduced them to a brand new world and, once they were inside it, led them to a seemingly endless series of new discoveries. The unpredictability of these discoveries had been like ‘reading a magic story’. Students had often faced challenges but had also derived satisfaction from overcoming them. The metaphors connect more strongly with ‘intrinsic’ motivation than with the more utilitarian concepts of ‘extrinsic’ and ‘instrumental’ motivation. This might reflect the composition of the learner group, who had all chosen to specialize in some form of English study in their previous education. However that may be, they encourage us to create space in our teaching for the humanistic dimensions of imagination and creativity, even in courses where the explicit aim is to serve a specific pragmatic purpose.

When communicative language teaching (CLT) was first developed in the 1970s, it was widely seen as the definitive response to the shortcomings of previous approaches and the communication needs of a globalized world. As such, it was exported enthusiastically over the world as a ready-to-use package of ideas and techniques. From the outset, however, there was no clear consensus about its nature,and teachers experienced difficulty in defining and implementing it. There is now a widespread view that teachers need to adapt CLT to suit specific contexts. CLT cannot now be defined in terms of precise characteristics but serves rather as an umbrella term for approaches that aim to develop communicative competence through personally meaningful learning experiences. In this spirit, we should aim to develop principles which help each teacher to develop a form of communication-oriented language teaching (COLT) suited to his or her own specific context.