Communicative Language Teaching in Low-Resource Multilingual Classrooms: A Critical Integrative Review of Principles and Material Dimensions with a Focus on Tanzania

Abstract

Communicative language teaching has been adopted as the official orientation of English language curricula across much of sub-Saharan Africa, yet the conditions that the approach presupposes are frequently absent from the classrooms in which it is mandated. Tanzania presents a demanding test of the approach. English becomes the medium of instruction at the point of transition to secondary schooling, most learners arrive with limited command of it, Kiswahili functions as the national lingua franca alongside more than a hundred community languages, and classes are large while teaching materials are scarce. This review examines what can defensibly be claimed about the operation of communicative principles under these conditions, with particular attention to the material dimension of implementation, meaning textbooks, supplementary and authentic resources, and the ways in which such artefacts are used, adapted or circumvented in practice. Literature was identified through structured searching of multidisciplinary, education-specific and African scholarly sources, and evidence was appraised for design adequacy, transparency, contextual specificity and consistency with independent findings. Three findings emerge with reasonable confidence. First, the recurring account of failed implementation rests on a version of communicative language teaching that its principal theorists have long abandoned, so that documented departures from an activity template are weak evidence about communicative principles as such. Second, the material base functions less as a delivery vehicle for method than as a constraint that shapes which interactional possibilities exist at all, and locally developed language-supportive materials show promise that remains inadequately evaluated. Third, the Tanzanian evidence base is dominated by small qualitative and self-report studies concentrated in accessible regions, with almost no learning-outcome data and no replication. Priorities for research are identified accordingly, together with the design features that would allow the field to move beyond documenting non-implementation.