Chapter I communicative Competence as a skill needed for communication

Chapter I Communicative Competence as a skill needed for communication

1.1. Background to Teaching Communication (speaking)

As we know for many years teachers taught speaking by having students repeat sen­tences and recite memorized textbook dialogues. Audiolingual repetition drills were designed to familiarize students with the sounds and structural pat­terns of the target language. Students learned to speak by practicing grammatical struc­tures and then later using them in conversation. So an audiolingual speaking lesson might involve an interaction like as in Example.

T stands for teacher and S represents a particular student. Ss stands for students. (Textbook lines are in quotation marks.)
T: Repeat after me in chorus please: "Good morning, Ann." Ss: "Good morning, Ann." T: "Where are you studying?" Ss: "Where are you studying?" T: Good. "I'm studying at the university." Ss: "I’m studying at the university." T: Listen: "I'm studying to at the university." Ss: "I’m studying at the university." T: Listen again. " uni-ver-sity." T: Good! Now the next part.

The concept of habit formation, of behaviorism, is the theoretical basis of the audio-lingual method. Since learners needed to form good habits, les­sons involved a great deal of repetition. Students were not supposed to form bad habits, so teachers treated spoken errors quickly. Teachers worried that if errors were left untreated, the students might learn those erroneous forms.

For many years, teaching speaking involved providing students with the components of the language, hoping that they would eventually put them all together and speak. So students might spend several semesters repeating after the teacher, studying grammar rules, reciting dialogues, and learning vocabulary. Unfortunately, actual conversations didn't sound like the text­book dialogues, and students couldn’t use them in conversations.

Nowadays, language acquisition research made us reconsider some long-standing beliefs about how people learn to speak. Several studies led to the conclusion that we had gotten the basic idea back­wards: People don't learn the pieces of the language and then put them together to make conversations. Instead, learners learn better by interacting with other people.

The realization of interaction has several interesting implications. If we believe that peo­ple learn languages by interacting, then learners should interact during les­sons. As a result, a method called communicative language teaching arose. There are two versions of communicative language teaching emerged. The one version says teachers should teach the components of language but include communication activities. The next version says since students learn through interacting, lessons should be organized in the way giving opportunity to learners to communicate in the tar­get language. In this method, teachers often downplay accuracy and empha­size how students communicate when they speak the target language.

According to Lightbown and Spada, in comparison grammar translation or audiolingualism that merely focuses on learners' ability to produce accurate language form and structure, the communicative leaning teaching approach empha­sizes the learners' ability to efficiently use the target language in different contexts. By pairing up learners and involving them in a wide range of meaningful interactive discussion tasks the teacher expects to promote the learners' ability to achieve the communicative goal, rather than forming grammatical sentences.

However, in order to communicate well in another language, we must make ourselves understood by the people we are speaking with, and this is not an easy task-especially at the beginning and intermediate levels. There is some need to be accurate in speaking the target language. This is tricky because, as we saw in the speaking-writing contrast, there is limited time for planning and editing speech during conversations. And for less-than-proficient speakers, managing the components of language that must work togeth­er when we speak is very demanding indeed.²

Here I want to mention about communicative competence

Canale and Swain understood communicative competence as a synthesis of an underlying system of knowledge and skill needed for communication. In their concept of communicative competence, knowledge refers to the (conscious or unconscious) knowledge of an individual about lan­guage and about other aspects of language use. According to them, there are three types of knowledge: knowledge of underlying grammatical principles, knowledge of how to use language in a social context in order to fulfill communicative func­tions and knowledge of how to combine utterances and communicative functions with respect to discourse principles. In addition, their concept of skill refers to how an individual can use the knowledge in actual communication. According to Canale, skill requires a further distinction between underlying capacity and its manifestation in real communication, that is to say, in performance ^[2].

I think, Savignon, paid much greater attention on the aspect of ability in her concept of com­municative competence. Namely, she described communicative competence as «the ability to function in a truly communicative setting - that is, in a dynamic ex­change in which linguistic competence must adapt itself to the total informational input, both linguistic and paralinguistic, of one or more interlocutors". According to her, the nature of com­municative competence is not static but dynamic. As to the distinction between competence and performance, Savignon referred to competence as an underlying ability and to performance as an open manifestation of competence. In her opinion, competence can be observed, developed, main­tained and evaluated only through performance. Like many theoreticians in the field of language learning and teaching, Savignon compares com­municative competence with language proficiency. At approximately the same time and for similar reasons, Bachman sug­gested using the term «communicative language ability», claiming that this term combines in itself the meanings of both language proficiency and communicative competence. Relaying especially on Hymes, Widdowson and Candlin, Bachman defined communicative language ability as a concept comprised of knowledge or competence and capacity for appropriate use of knowledge in a contextual com­municative language use. According to this definition, Bachman devoted spe­cial attention to the aspect of language use - it is, the way how language is used for the purpose of achieving a particular communicative goal in a specific situational context of communication.

I totally agree with Campbell, although the CLT approach attempts to involve learners in more authentic and interactive learning tasks that pro­mote both comprehensible input and learners' language output, due to the nature of face-to-face interaction, teachers still find it challenging to exploit the approach and maximize the learning; especially when it is a true case in EFL classrooms. Unlike English as a Second Language (ESL) learners, EFL learners usually do not have the need to use the TL outside of the classroom; generally their only chance to put the language know­ledge into use is in the classroom. However, for the linier mode of traditional face-to-face interaction, EFL learners generally have limited time and chance to speak and use the TL in traditional classrooms. In a face-to-face interaction, turn-taking is required.

The interaction is when someone is talking, the other is silent and wait until his interlocutor finish talking, the interaction can be either learners interacting with the teacher or a learner interacting with other learners.

Factors, such as personality type, learning and response pace, motivation, and language proficiency can all lead to individual inequality to speak up in class or in groups. For example, learners who are shy, slow, or afraid of making errors may choose to speak less in the classroom or group discussions. Insufficient access to the TL both inside and outside of the classroom certainly is an obstacle to foster EFL learners' language proficiency. ³