I think Communicative approach has a relation with other methods. When I began to learn English, my teacher used to explain vocabulary and grammar from a text, then we mimick her to read it. Before teaching, she had an introduction which was very interesting. She had a good accent of a speaker of the BBC. One day, I noticed that she pronounced /f/ in Athens in the title: The Acropolis of Athens.I asked her the reason,she answered me:" Today, people pronounce like this". In that day, I don't know anything about Received pronunciation, Cokneys accent etc.. I thought she read so fast that she made mistake. It's OK. I went on to mimick her but I avoided this mistake.
When I was a teacher, I used to introduce the dialogue by comparing to our real-life. For example: Can I help you? I conveyed to my students:What do you want to buy? You should be nice! Don't chase away your customer:" If you don't buy anything, go away!" It's very rude. You need to show all pens that you have had. What would you like the red pen or the blue one?I show the red pen: It's a little too bright but it's very beautiful. The girl chooses the blue pen: It's very nice, I'll take it. Pictures, gestures, real objects, explanation in simple English, antonym, synonym,family words...It's up to you. The most important thing is your students should understand. After listening the tape many times, we play the role of Mary and the shop assistant by pair work. Sometimes, we divide our class into four groups, the most fluently speakers will etablish the dialogue in front of the class. Pair work and group work play an important role in communicative approach. Any teaching practice that help students to develop their communicative competence is acceptable. Mr Joe has just given us some examples about them.
In our new programme (with the aid of Belgian experts), we should use communicative approach method to teach. If you follow entirely all of the lessons., it means you have used TLC in your class. One thing I like most is the introduction, getting started.Usually, we begin our lesson by the warm -up step. You can direct your students to sing, to play games or to do some easy and interesting exercises to introduce your new lesson such as true-false, matching, gap-fill, multiple choice....and it doesn't need to correct them. There is a mixing of the3 steps warm -up, review the previous lesson and introduce the new lesson. When playing games or doing these exercises, we should do in pair or group in order learning by teaching and use English to exchange. We should encourage our students to speak English. If the teacher doesn't understand what the students say,don't tell them at once. We need to pretend that we don't know anything and react like the wrong that students say. They will conclude there is something wrong. Mistake is OK. That's the best way to encourage learners to develop their confidence to speak English.