Savignon writes in her book, Communicative Competence Theory and Classroom
Practice: Texts and Contexts in Second Language Learning (2nd ed.), that the
communicative approach to language teaching has become so popular that many materials
developers have jumped on the bandwagon, claiming a communicative focus to their materials.
She writes, “What ‘nutritious’ and ‘natural’ are today to
breakfast foods, ‘communicative’ and ‘functional’ are to language
texts. How much change has actually taken place is debatable. Just as cereals containing
‘all natural’ honey are no less sweet, so ‘asking questions’ may be
no more than a new label for an old unit on the formation of the interrogative” (p.
138).