Communicative Competence

1. Defining Communicative Competence.

2. Language Functions and Discourse Analysis.

3. Sociocultural Factors.

4. Cross-Linguistic Influence and Learner Language.

1. Defining Communicative Competence.

Canale and Swain (1980), in which four dimensions of communicative competence are identified: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, dis­course competence, and strategic competence. Grammatical competence refers to what Chomsky calls linguistic competence and what Hymes intends by what is "formally possible." It is the domain of grammatical and lexical capacity. Sociolinguistic competence refers to an understand­ing of the social context in which communication takes place, including role relationships, the shared information of the participants, and the communicative purpose for their interaction. Discourse competence re­fers to the interpretation of individual message elements in terms of their interconnectedness and of how meaning is represented in relationship to the entire discourse or text. Strategic competence refers to the coping strategies that communicators employ to initiate, terminate, maintain, repair, and redirect communication.

2. Language Functions and Discourse Analysis

Seven basic functions that language performs for children learning their first language have been described:

1. the instrumental function: using language to get things;

2. the regulatory function: using language to control the behavior of others;

3. the interactional function: using language to create interaction with others;

4. the personal function: using language to express personal feelings and meanings;

5. the heuristic function: using language to learn and to discover;

6. the imaginative function: using language to create a world of the imagination;

7. the representational function: using language to communicate information.

3. Sociocultural Factors

Culture helps us to know how far we can go as individuals and what our responsibility is to the group. Culture might also be defined as the ideas, customs, skills, arts, and tools that characterize a given group of people in a given period of time. But culture is more than the sum of its parts. "It is a system of integrated patterns, most of which remain below the threshold of consciousness, yet all of which govern human behavior just as surely as the manipulated strings of a puppet control its motions" (Condon 1973-4). The fact that no society exists without a culture reflects the need for culture to fulfill cer­tain biological and psychological needs in human beings. Consider the bewildering host of confusing and contradictory facts and propositions and ideas that present themselves every day to any human being; some organization of these facts is necessary to provide some order to potential chaos, and therefore conceptual networks of reality evolve within a group of people for such organization. The mental constructs that enable us thus to survive are a way of life that we call "culture."

Culture establishes for each person a context of cognitive and affec­tive behavior, a template for personal and social existence. But we tend to perceive reality within the context of our own culture, a reality that we have "created," and therefore not necessarily a reality that is empirically defined. "The meaningful universe in which each human being exists is not a universal reality, but 'a category of reality' consisting of selectively organ­ized features considered significant by the society in which he lives". Although the opportunities for world travel in the last several decades have increased markedly, there is still a tendency for us to believe that our own reality is the "correct" perception.

It is apparent that culture, as an ingrained set of behaviors and modes of perception, becomes highly important in the learning of a second lan­guage. A language is a part of a culture, and a culture is a part of a language; the two are intricately interwoven so that one cannot separate the two without losing the significance of either language or culture.

4. Cross-Linguistic Influence and Learner Language.

19. Speak on the three elements of an English class: engage, study and activate according to Jeremy Harmer and the lesson models based on them. Most current language teaching tries to offer a judicious blend of many of the ideas and elements discussed above. It recognizes the value of language exposure through comprehensible input, while still believing that most people (apart from young children) find chances to concentrate on language forms and how they can be used extremely helpful. Current language teaching practice generally gives students the opportunity to think about how a piece of grammar works (or which words group together, for example), while at the same time providing opportunities for language use in communicative activities and task-based procedures. It offers students the security of appropriate controlled practice (depending on variables such as the students' age, personal learning styles and the language in question), while also letting them have a go at using all and any language they know.

Such eclecticism - choosing between the best elements of a number of different ideas and methods - is a proper response to the competing claims of the various trends we have described. However, the danger of eclecticism is the possible conclusion that since we can use bits and pieces from different theories and methods, 'anything goes'. Our lessons can then become a disorganised ragbag of different activities with no obvious coherence or philosophy to underpin them. This can be just as damaging as the methodological rigidity that eclecticism aims to replace.

However, eclecticism that makes use of an underlying philosophy and structure, in other words, a principled eclecticism avoids these risks. Believing that students need exposure, motivation and opportunities for language use, and acknowledging that different students may respond more or less well to different stimuli, it suggests that most teaching sequences need to have certain characteristics or elements, whether they take place over a few minutes, half an hour, a lesson or a sequence of lessons. These elements are Engage, Study and Activate. Having discussed what they mean, we will go on to look at how they can occur within three typical sequences (out of many).

Engage (E) Most of us can remember lessons at school which were uninvolving and where we 'switched off' from what was being taught. We may also remember lessons where we were more or less paying attention, but where we were not really 'hooked'. We were not engaged emotionally with what was going on; we were not curious, passionate or involved. Yet things are learnt much better if both our minds and our hearts are brought into service. Engagement of this type is one of the vital ingredients for successful learning.

Activities and materials which frequently engage students include: games (depending on the age of the learners and the type of game), music, discussions (when handled challengingly), stimulating pictures, dramatic stories, amusing anecdotes, etc. Even where such activities and materials are not used, teachers can do their best to ensure that their students engage with the topic, exercise or language they are going to be dealing with by asking them to make predictions, or relate classroom materials to their own lives. A lot will depend, of course, on what the individual students are like, as we saw in Chapter 1, and how well the teacher provokes and encourages engagement.

The reason why this element is so important in teaching sequences, therefore, is that when students are properly engaged, their involvement in the study and activation stages is likely to be far more pronounced, and, as a result, the benefit they get from these will be considerably greater.

Study (S) Study activities are those where the students are asked to focus on the construction of something, whether it is the language itself, the ways in which it is used or how it sounds and looks. Study activities can range from the focus on and practice of a single sound to an investigation of how a writer achieves a particular effect in a long text; from the examination and practice of a verb tense to the study of a transcript of informal speech in order to discuss spoken style. In the PPP procedure described above, both presentation and practice (the first two stages) are focusing on the construction of an element of grammar or lexis; after all, controlled practice (where students repeat many phrases using the language they are focusing on) is designed to make students think about language construction. When we have students repeat words with the correct pronunciation (or say the words we want them to say based on cues we give them), it is because we want them to think about the best way to say the words. We want them to think of the construction of the words' pronunciation.

But study here means more than the PPP procedure - although PPP is, of course, one kind of study. Students can study in a variety of different ways. Sometimes we may show them a new grammar pattern, repeating each element separately or putting a diagram on the board before getting them to repeat sentences, and that is very much like a PPP procedure. But at other times, we may show students examples of language and ask them to try to work out the rules. Such discovery activities ask the students to do all the intellectual work, rather than leaving it to the teacher. Sometimes students can read a text together and find words and phrases they want to concentrate on for later study. At other times, they may spend time, with the teacher, listening to or looking at the language they have used to see when it has been more or less successful. All of these (and many other possibilities) are examples of the study of language construction.

Some typical language areas for study might be the study and practice of the vowel sound in 'ship' and 'sheep' (e.g. 'chip', 'cheap', 'dip', 'deep', 'bit', 'beat', etc), the study and practice of the third person singular of the present simple ('He sleeps', 'she laughs', 'it works', etc), the study and practice of lexical phrases for inviting (' Would you like to come to the cinema/to a concert?', etc), the study and practice of the way we use pronouns in written discourse (e.g. A man entered a house in Brixton. He was tall with an unusual hat. It was multicoloured...’ etc), the study and practice of paragraph organisation (topic sentence, development, conclusion) or of the rules for using 'make' and 'do'.

Activate (A)

This element describes exercises and activities which are designed to get students using language as freely and communicatively as they can (as in CLT - see page 50). We will not be asking them to focus on the use of a particular structure, or to try to use words from a list we give them. That would make what they are doing more like a study activity, where they are expected to focus on the accuracy of specific bits of language, rather than on the message they are trying to convey or the task that needs to be performed. The objective in an activate activity is for them to use all and any language which may be appropriate for a given situation or topic. In this way, students get a chance to try out real language use with little or no restriction - a kind of rehearsal for the real world.

Personalisation (where students use language they have studied to talk about themselves, or to make their own original dialogues, often as the third or production phase of PPP) provides a bridge between the study and activate stages. But more genuinely activate exercises include role-plays (where students act out, as realistically as possible, an exchange between a travel agent and a client, for example), advertisement design (where students write and then record a radio commercial, for example), debates and discussions, Describe and draw (where one student tries to get another to draw a picture without that other student being able to see the original), story and poem writing, email exchanges, writing in groups, etc.

Activation is not just about producing language in speech and writing, however. When students read or listen for pleasure (or when they are listening or reading to understand the message rather than thinking about the form of the language they are seeing or hearing), they are involved in language activation. They are using all and any language at their disposal to comprehend the reading or listening text.

But, of course, students may, once they have been through an activation stage, go back to what they have said or to the text they have read, and focus upon its construction. Activation can be a prelude to study, rather than necessarily the other way round.

All three ESA elements need to be present in most lessons or teaching sequences. Whatever the main focus of the lesson (e.g. a grammar topic or a reading skills exercise), students always need to be engaged, if possible, so that they can get the maximum benefit from the learning experience. Most students will readily appreciate opportunities to activate their language knowledge, but for many of them the inclusion of study elements, however small or of short duration these are, will persuade them of the usefulness of the lesson.

Some events, for example a debate or a role-play, a prolonged Internet-based search or a piece of extended writing take a lot of time and so, in one lesson, teachers may not want to interrupt the flow of activation with a study stage. But they may want to use the exercise as a basis for study (perhaps in a different lesson). The same might be true of an extended study period where chances for activation are few. But, in both these cases, the only limitation is time. The missing elements will appear at some other time.

The majority of teaching and learning at lower levels is not made up of such long activities, however. Instead, it is far more likely that there will be more than one ESA sequence in a given lesson sequence or period.

20. Speak on planning as an integral part of teaching profession. Describe the types of plans you know, say how they help organize the teaching process effectively. Warm up (review) 5 min, Homework check 10 min, Introduction new material 5-10 min, Practice new material 5-15 min, Assign homework 5 min, Warm up. 5 min, Total: 45 min.

1 Lesson plans

The writing of lesson plans has a number of important functions: