Bao Wenmin

In the area of language teaching methodology, the predominant emphasis until recently has been on the teaching of grammar. The recent movement toward communicative language teaching has been associated with a broader view of language that includes not just its grammatical aspects, but also the ability to use language appropriately in different contexts and the ability to organise one’s thoughts through language. That is to say, the recent emphasis on communication in language is expressed in attempts to develop students’ socialculture, discourse and strategic competencies in addition to their grammatical competence. It was developed by Canale and Swain (1980). The next 4 sections describe what communicative competence is.

Communicative Competence

Grammatical Competence

·        sentence-level grammar

·        phonology

·        lexis

·        morphology

·        the ability to use a rule, not state it, in a given text

Discourse Competence

·        the ability to construct an appropriate text

·        coherence (especially global)

·        cohesive devices

·        linking sentences

Socialculture Competence

·        social and cultural context

·        awareness of how the above can affect communication

Strategic Competence

·        coping strategies

·        how to repair mistakes/overcome problems

It is generally acknowledged that the ultimate aim in language learning is to acquire communicative competence, to interpret. Traditional teaching and teacher training have based themselves firmly on the “four skills” of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. It is also been generally agreed, perhaps, that traditionally the focus of attention has been on the linguistic skills and that it has commonly been supposed that once these are acquired in reasonable measure communicative competence will follow as a more or less automatic consequence. What evidence we have, however, suggests that this is not the case: the acquisition of linguistic skills does not seem to guarantee the consequent acquisition of communicative competence in a language. On the contrary, it would seem to be the case that an over-emphasis on drills and exercises for the production and reception of sentences tends to inhibit the development of communicative competence. This is not meant to imply that such drills and exercises are not necessary. The question is how can the skills be taught, not as a self-sufficient achievement but as an aspect of communicative competence? How can skill be related to abilities, usage to use? To illustrate this, let us take a lesson “Seeing a doctor” for example.

Activity one: Show students a video and teach students sentence patterns like: What’s wrong with you?

         I have a pain in the leg.

         It’s nothing serious.

         …

 Ask students to practise in pair so that they can produce grammatical forms and sentences accurately in the context of particular questions. This activity is designed to focus on grammatical accuracy within sentences.

  ---Grammatical Competence

 Activity two: Ask students to act it out.  Tell them that if they don’t know the word when talking with somebody, they can use gestures, body language etc. to explain what they want to express. For example, if they don’t know how to say “stomach-ache”, they can say like this “I have a pain here.”(Pointing to their stomach). Then someone else may understand what you mean. This activity is designed to focus on coping strategies and overcoming problems when communicating with others.

 ---Strategic Competence

Activity three: Let students watch videos about “Seeing a doctor” and “In a shop” … Then there is a role-playing task for students in which students have to take the part of patient, doctor and customer and shop assistant, focusing on the students’ ability to make clear and accurate reference to characters, objects and locations; to produce logically coherent text and to perform the basic tasks required. This activity is designed to focus on textual cohesion and coherence.

  ---Discourse Competence

Activity four: Give students a set of slides with taped descriptions, which represents situations of different levels of formality to which students have to respond appropriately with a request, offer, or complaint. This activity is designed to focus on social appropriateness of language use.

 ---Socialculture Competence

Such are the activities we often have in class. And we think they are available basis for natural behaviour in conversational interaction in class, and can help students to develop communicative competence and improve language proficiency.

Bibliography:

Brumfit, C. (1984). Communicative Methodology in Language Teaching Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Harley, B .et al.(1990). The Development of Second Language Proficiency Cambridge:Cambridge University Press

Widdowson, H. G. (1978). Teaching Language as Communication Cambridge: Cambridge University Press