The Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)

If I remember when I went to school my English teachers always tried to encourage us to start talking in English and produce effective sentences in order to express our ideas without paying attention about mistakes, grammar, patterns, etc. because the main topic was regarding communication.
In somen cases my teachers made a great effort despite the fact that from my 5 English-teacher at least 3 were not very good. However, now, many years later, simple questions come to my mind such as what happened to our knowledge achieved when we left school? Have we tried to improve our English? The answer may vary but all of them are related to one topic: effective communication.
Despite the different approaches in teaching a foreign language I believe that the communicative method is highlighting due to the fact that express our ideas, thoughts and feelings is an innate activity we do every day in our life. At this point I am capable to say that commuicative method requires other ones to be effective because in isolation all the efforts made by teachers and students are unnecessary but requires motivation as well.
In short, the communicative method tries to face the students to real life paying attention to their needs. That is why our job as future English teachers consist of facing them inside the classroom to fictional situations but, however, that are part of the real world.