If, as research reveals, even those teachers who are committed to communicative language teaching (CLT) fail to create genuine communication in their classrooms, it is partly because teacher educators have not given them the necessary tools to achieve their desired goals. This paper proposes that a framework of five macrostrategies offers a possible tool to make the communicative classroom genuinely communicative. The paper presents a classroom observational study to assess whether the macrostrategies framework will help CLT teachers maximize learning potential in the classroom. An analysis of two classroom episodes taught by two committed CLT teachers featuring the same group of learners revealed that one episode was evidently more communicative than the other. The relative success in maximizing learning potential witnessed in one episode and the relative failure witnessed in another is attributed to the use and non-use of the macrostrategies framework. The study shows that given appropriate tools CLT teachers will succeed in making their classes genuinely ycommunicative.