Abstract
Although the word "comunication" is prevalent in the Course of Study for secondary school English in Japan, few novice teachers have an idea of how communicative language teaching (CLT) can be practiced in their contexts. CLT is not a concrete teaching method, but rather an approach which consists of broad principles about language teaching and learning. How it is practiced depends on the context where it is employed. This paper will present critical incidents occurring when a novice teacher conducts CLT to reveal what the princples of CLT look like in practice and issues that novice teachers might encounter when conducting CLT. Critical incidents are unanticipated events which occur during a lesson that generate insights about teaching and learning. The critical incidents were told by a second year junior high school English teacher.
