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.