In his discussion paper, David Stern provides a valuable review of the historical development of communicative language teaching. In addition, he clarifies the conceptual distinction between analytic and experiential strategies and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of both. One issue that leads to difficulty is the existence of two distinct approaches to communicative language teaching which are often confused: (1) a functional-analytic approach that emphasizes teaching about communication through the study of speech acts, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistics, and (2) an experiential approach that emphasizes teaching through communication in a natural manner without any prior selection or arrangement of the language items to be learned. Stern points out that the COLT studies did not always succeed in clearly distinguishing these two concepts. For example, “explicit focus on function/discourse/ sociolinguistics” is listed as an experiential feature in the table that served as the basis for rank-ordering the schools in the core French observation study. This was in fact done deliberately in the expectation that talking about discourse coherence and situational appropriateness (in the target language) would constitute a communicatively rich activity. However, with the benefit of hindsight, we agree with Stern that the activities he cites are inherently analytic rather than experiential. This categorization problem did not affect the core French results, since less than 1 percent of observed time was assigned to activities focusing on functional, discourse, or sociolinguistic aspects of language.