The ministry of higher and secondary specialized education of the republic of uzbekistan

Homework Task Five

Please refer to the lesson you chose for Homework Task One. In a one-page report or less, please do the following: First, explain briefly how you understand strategic competence (i.e., what does strategic competence mean to you); Second, explain how you can include strategic competence in the lesson for Homework Task One.

Strategic competence is essential as learners determine their own way to learn that’s why it relates to the effectively usage of strategies to enhance comprehension and solve communication problems. For these purposes the communicator uses different strategies in order to support the learning and communicative process and in language acquisition process it is called communicative strategy. Many scientists stress the importance of strategic competence as an essential component in communicative competence and they suggest that it plays a major role in communicating successfully to develop second language learners’ communicative competence. The linguists proposed two areas related to strategic competence: the learners’ skill in transmitting messages successfully and comprehensibly to the listener or understanding the information received, and the use of communication strategies by both speakers and listeners to solve their problems when arise during the language learning. I think that one of the most extraordinary paradoxes in language teaching is the fact that we rarely teach, or even allow, our students to use the kind of communication strategies that even native speakers are often forced to use. We are still very much concerned with exact communication- something which perhaps does not even exist. To my mind, strategic competence is the ability and skill of using communicative sub-strategies when students forget the exact word or expression. Sometimes it happens with me if I do not know any particular word/concept, using techniques of explaining it to a person who needs to know it. If I focus on developing my students’ strategic competence during the lessons, information gap or opinion gap activities that are used as a task- based technique can be a good way in which all students will be taking part in exploring and using one of the concepts of strategic competence. Strategic competence refers to the individual’s ability to use communication strategies such as paraphrase, circumlocution, word coinage, literal translation, lexical approximation, and mime to get their messages across and to compensate for a limited or imperfect knowledge of rules. As a teacher, I take notes of communication strategies used by the students while the students are in the process of giving information when they come across an uneasy situation.

One of the possible ways of teaching strategic competence is asking the students what strategies they use in their language learning or have used in their development of speaking skills. A teacher can give them list of strategies and ask each student what strategies are they or which ones they have used in their learning. The task will help the students to analyze their strategies and understand why people use different strategies while communicating or learning a foreign language. At the end of the task, students can be given a homework task that asks them to describe the strategies _{that they are going to use in their learning experience.}