In recent decades, teachers of second languages in many countries, including Australia, have been encouraged to use an approach known as Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). This approach advocates the development of communicative competence as a primary goal through the extensive use of the second language as a means of communication during classroom lessons. Understandably, education authorities and teacher educators are keen to know what teachers understand by CLT and how well they have incorporated this approach into their second language teaching. This exploratory study seeks to answer these questions in respect of one teacher, who claims to use a CLT approach. This is done by documenting her personal practical theory of CLT, using a framework adapted from a well-known approach to describing models of teaching. Access to the teacher's practical theory was gained through indepth, semi-structured interviews and stimulated recall interviews involving use of videotapes of two of the teacher's lessons. The study establishes that the teacher's practical theory is an amalgam of many features of CLT approaches and of general teaching. The CLT components of the teacher's practical theory are largely consistent with features commonly listed in texts about CLT approaches, though there are some components of her theory that are not generally discussed in the CLT literature. The framework used in this study for representing the teacher's practical theories of CLT is also assessed and considered suitable for wider use.

This study seeks to document teachers' conceptions of communicative language teaching (CLT) and to compare their conceptions with a composite view of CLT assembled, in part, from researchers' accounts of the distinctive features of CLT. The research was prompted by a review of the relevant research literature showing that, though previous studies in this area have pointed to some significant differences between teachers' and researchers' conceptions of CLT, the results are still inconclusive. In this study, usual methods for accessing teachers' understandings of CLT, such as observation and questionnaire, have been replaced by one that examines teachers' practical theories that guide their use of CLT approaches in classrooms. Semistructured interviews and video-stimulated recall interviews were used to gain access to teachers' practical theories of CLT. The interview data show that while these teachers collectively have internalized most of the elements of communicative approaches, there are many individual variations. The data also show that these teachers have integrated aspects of communicative approaches into an overall view of teaching that incorporates many features not normally mentioned in the second language literature.

Student talk is linguistic output with potential for developing communicative competence (Bachman, 1990;Canale, 1983;Canale & Swain, 1980). In language classrooms turns of talk facilitate the meaning making process as students and teachers collaboratively come to understand the discourse of knowledge that they are co-constructing (Vygotsky, 1978;Wells, 1999) in their interactions together, teacher to student and student to student. Questions shape the essential teaching exchange IRE/F as a teacher initiates (I) the first move, a student responds (R) and the teacher again takes up a turn and evaluates (E) in the follow-up (F) move. As common and useful as this exchange is for managing classroom behaviour, during the pivotal third turn in the essential teaching exchange (Young, 1992) there is potential for teachers to facilitate student talk when the teacher provides alternatives to a follow-up question (Dillon, 1988). This case study of young adult English as a Second Language (ESL) users in face-toface interaction in a university preparatory study skills course (UNIPREP) indicates a limiting influence of teacher questioning on student talk in discussions. Rather than talk being generated by a teacher's questioning, alternatives to questions lead to the increased length of turns in students' collaborative talk. This study brings a discourse analysis focus to whole class discussion between teacher and international UNIPREP students in the higher education sector and provides a context for second language acquisition researchers, teachers and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) trainers.

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