Communicative Competence

COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE

Michael Canale and Merrill Swain

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1.      Background

1.1  Grammatical and communicative approaches

Paragraph 1   Second Language courses are organized mainly under a grammar-based or grammatical approach and, on the other hand, some of them are organized under a communicative or functional approach.

Paragraph 2 There is a third approach which may be organized under the different situations in which the learner of the second language may be involved. But in this paper the situational approach will be part of either the grammatical or the functional approach.

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Paragraph 1  The term approach refers to principles of syllabus construction and not     to the materials and methods used in the classroom.

1.2  Competence and Performance

 

Paragraph  2   Researchers use the terms competence and performance in discussion of second language approaches.

Paragraph 3 Chomsky introduced these terms in 1965

Paragraph 3 Competence refers to knowledge of grammar and competence refers to the actual use of the language.

Paragraph 4 Chomsky claims  that  the competence refers to the system a native speaker has internalized and that performance refers mainly to the psychological factors involved in the production of speech.

Theory of competence versus theory of performance

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Paragraph 2 Campbell and Wales ( 1970) The most important ability is to be able to produce utterances which don’t need to be grammatically correct but useful in a communicative situation.

Paragraph 3 A child acquires knowledge of a language not only its grammar but also the knowledge of when to use the language appropriately.

Paragraph 4 Campbell and Wale s propose  the notion of Communicative Competence.

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Paragraph 2  Munby ( 1978) Communicative Competence includes grammatical Competence.

Rules of language use and rules of grammar are equally important.

Paragraph 3  Kempson  (1965) claims that competence is grammar and performance is communicative competence.

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Paragraph 1  The study of sociolinguistic competence is as important as the study of communicative or grammatical competence.

Paragraph 2 “ If a communicative approach to second language teaching is adopted, then principles of syllabus design must integrate grammatical and sociolinguistic competence.”  Page 6  Canale and swain.

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Paragraph 3 Communicative performance includes factors such as volition, motivation and pathology.

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2. Some theories of Communicative Competence

-          Theories of basic communication skills

-          Comprehensive and integrated theories

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Paragraph 1 Theories of Communicative Competence:

A theory of basic communication skills emphasizes the minimum level of communication skills you need to be part in a language situation.

Van Ek (1976)  “ threshold level

Paragraph 3 Van Ek (1976) He emphasizes communicative functions and notions. He supplies a list of functions.

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Paragraph 2 To have an effective language learning emphasis should be put from the beginning on getting one’s meaning across, and not on grammatically correct utterances.

Paragraph 3 Van Ek ( 1976) There are levels in the threshold level of a native language that learners of second languages must be able to attain.

Paragraph 4 Grammaticalness and appropriateness of utterances versus getting one’s meaning across.

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Paragraph 2 Savignon ( 1972)  It is not clear enough if learners will be accurate in the use of grammar if the emphasis is not put in it  from the very beginning.

Interlanguage: a system that satisfies the basic  communicative needs in the classroom.

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Paragraph 2  Some findings suggest that native speakers are tolerant of the mistakes a second language learner may make.

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Paragraph 1  Communicative tasks: getting one’s meaning across.

CC group: Communicative competence group versus Culture Lab and Grammatical competence group. CC group has a higher score in a test.

Paragraph 2  Tucker : individuals  who were not able to get high scores in grammar were able to communicate as good as individuals of high measured proficiency in English.

Paragraph 3 conclusion It is not a  sufficient condition to focus on grammar to develop communicative competence.

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Paragraph 1  Language use skills: the attention to basic communication skills interferes in  the development of grammatical skills.

Paragraph 3 There are no strong theoretical reasons to emphasize getting one’s meaning across  over grammatical  accuracy at early stages. Conclusion: aspects of grammatical competence should be taught at early stages.

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Paragraph 1  Combination of grammar and communication.

Paragraph 2  Adoption of at least a basic communicative approach = acquisition of basic communication skills.

Paragraph 3  Social context which is ethnography of speaking.

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Paragraph 1 Communicative Competence: grammatical, psycholinguistic, socio cultural and probabilistic systems of competence.

Paragraph 2   to express  in a native like way

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Paragraph 1 Hymes (1967) uses the notion of Speech event : participants, setting, message, topic, key, code, norms of interaction, norms of interpretations and genre.

Paragraph 2  Hymes these components are crucial.

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Paragraph 1 Halliday System of language potential

Paragraph 2 Munby ( 1978) meaningful communication is not possible without grammar.

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Paragraph 3 Halliday and Hymes have been concerned with: social context, grammar, and social meaning

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Paragraph 1  Integrative theories of communicative competence focus on speaking, listening, writing and reading.

Paragraph 2 Widdowson  makes a distinction between cohesion and coherence.

Cohesion is how structures are linked and coherence is the relationship among the meanings in an utterance.

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Paragraph 2 Conversational analysis, analysis of classroom discourse, discourse routines, choice of utterances and social status.

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Paragraph 1  Threshold level can be offered as the minimum objective for the teaching of foreign languages , it is not “the” objective .

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Paragraph 3 The most practical concern of  a second language programme would be the communicative purpose which will develop a more positive attitude of the learner towards the language.

Paragraph 4   You can not associate language only with communication.

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Paragraph 1 Children acquire forms they need  to use.

Paragraph 2 In communication the attention goes to the language use and not to the grammatical usage.

Paragraph 3 A methodology should be focused to the use of language.

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General Comments

Paragraph 1  breakdowns in communications- authentic communicative situations- communicative channel

Paragraph 3 Carroll ( 1978)  distinguishes three levels of performance: basic-intermediate and advanced.

Evaluation criteria: size-complexity, range, speed and flexibility.

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Paragraph 1 performance assessment : accuracy ,appropriacy , independence, repetition, hesitation)

Paragraph 2 terms to assess communicative interaction: settings, topic,function,modality adopted by speaker/ writer, presuppositions behind the utterances, role of speaker/ writer, status of the utterance, formality, mood of speaker / writer

Paragraph 3 Morrow (1972) includes grammatical  accuracy for integrative tests but excludes grammar from tests of communicative competence.

Paragraph 4  Munby classifies language skills and Morrow proposes the use of a communicative approach.

Page 27  Paragraph 2 There are five important principles that guide the development of a communicative approach:

1. Communicative competence: grammatical-sociolinguistic competence and communication strategies.
2. A communicative approach responds to the learners’ needs.
3. The learner needs the opportunity to take part in meaningful communicative situations.

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4. Optimal use of aspects developed in the learning process of the native language.

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5. Interaction in the second language.

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Paragraph 1 Reduction of uncertainty.

Paragraph 3 They envisage an integrative communicative approach.

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Paragraph 2 Sociolinguistic competence: Socio cultural rules of use and rules of discourse.

Paragraph 5 Strategic competence: paraphrase grammatical forms and those related to sociolinguistic competence.

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Paragraph 1 Stern ( 1978) strategies acquired by experience in real life communication.

Paragraph 2 Authentic texts must be used in the classroom from the beginning.

Three components of communicative competence.

Paragraph 4 Four main areas of language teaching: syllabus design, methodology, teacher training, and materials development.

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Paragraph 2 a functionally organized communicative approach different from a grammatically based communicative approach.

Negative attitude towards the language and towards the speakers of the language.

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Paragraph 1 Communicative incompetence projects a negative attitude towards the language.

Paragraph 3 Communication activities must be as meaningful as possible,

Paragraph 4 Teacher must have an activating role as the instigator of situations.

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Paragraph 1  Fruitful empirical investigation, native texts should be incorporated.

Paragraph 3  Measure communicative competence with integrative type tests.

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Paragraph 3 Reliable score procedures.

My Approach Indicator

I have been teaching for many years and the interaction with the different students I have had so far has given me the capacity to decide what teaching techniques are the best for each of them.

In my opinion the main focus in a language teaching course should be given, on the first hand, to the meanings of the words because if one does not know what the different words represent it is not possible to use them in the right situation. It is important to teach students vocabulary in order for them to write meaningful sentences.

On the other hand, the intrinsic, personal motivation we have as learners is the will we each have to learn. Every piece of information can be related with new things which at the same time may lead us to new knowledge.

Although motivation is important when it comes to learning, it is evident that the shared knowledge must carry a great weight. If a student is motivated to learn but the lessons do not have any meaning behind them, the teacher has the obligation to come up a lesson that not only will actually teach something to the student, but which is also dynamic enough for it to be acknowledged and stored permanently in the learner’s mind.

Finally, I think that we must respect the different cultures we may find inside a classroom. Each student is different and although the idea of teaching and actually reaching each and every one of them at the same time might be really ambitious, one must try to make it their goal to make a lesson be as successful as it can possibly be.

Summary: Approaches

Summary

The Audiolingual Method

The Second World War broke out and the Americans needed to speak different languages . Not only their enemies’ languages but also their allies. In this way a new method arose  known as the Army Method.

The success of the Army Method and the interests that people had in the USA to learn languages enables its use in the education institutions. The method had variations and adaptations  and changed its name to Audiolingual Method. The most important characteristics of the method were  very little use of mother tongue and explanations of grammatical aspects; language is taught with the use of repetition and is presented in forms of dialogues and the learners were supposed to memorize and create error free responses, among others.

Designer Methods

Community Language Method

Some linguists and psychologists recognized the importance of the affective domain  in the nature of all learning.. The learner of the language is seen as a client ant the teacher as his counselor . Whenever the clients needs to say something he uses his mother tongue and the counselor gives him the translation of the word he needs to use in the foreign language. The learner repeats the word or utterance another client responds  and the counselor translates this new utterance and the conversation continues in this way. Language is learnt in the community and the learners asks, listens and repeats until he is able to create his own utterances. In this way after months or years  he becomes an independent learner of the foreign language.

Suggestopedia

This new method acknowledges the capacity of the human brain to learn languages when the right conditions to learn are given. Baroque music was important when using this method to learn the new language in a relaxed way and the music enables the learner to be relaxed enough to act as a child if the situations required him to do so.

Although Suggestopedia  received some criticisms, it is important to mention that the method recognized and empowered the importance and benefits of being relaxed while learning a foreign language.

The Silent Way

Gattegno, the founder of the Silent Way believed that the learner needed to be responsible, independent and autonomous in his learning process. On the other hand, learners should be able to learn in a collaborative way and helping others. The teacher who was a stimulator of the process remained in silence most of the times encouraging his students to find the solutions. Rods were used to teach vocabulary  and syntax.

Total Physical Response

Asher, the developer of Total Physical Response, noted that children  before speaking their mother tongue  did a lot of listening and that they  were also  able to perform certain tasks  following some given instructions. The method  proved to be highly efficient at the children’s primary stages of learning and lost its effectiveness when children became advanced learners of the language.

Natural Approach

To develop basic communication skills  was the main objective of this method developed by Tracy Terrell who was a colleague of Stephen Krashen .

Languages are learned in a natural, relaxed  atmosphere and they emerge naturally .

In the natural approach learners were supposed to move from a preproduction stage to an early production stage  finishing  with an extended production stage. Fluency is encouraged in all stages so errors do not interfere  in the production of natural language.

Language Teaching Methods: A critical Analysis

Humanistic Tradition

The best known interpreter and proponent of humanism in language teaching was Earl Stevick who was not satisfied with audio lingual habit theory and cognitive code learning.

 He concluded that success or failure in language teaching depended not so much on deductive or inductive techniques but he believed that  the positive attitude towards the teacher, the classmates , the target language and culture are the most relevant aspects to consider when we speak about language learning.

The most important functions of the teacher according to Earl Stevick are:

1. The cognitive function: the teacher possesses the knowledge that students need to manage.
2. The classroom management function: students and society think that teachers are responsible for how the student’s time is used in class.
3. Practical goals: Students and society have language goals that must be included in language teaching syllabuses.
4. The personal and interpersonal function:  teachers have the responsibility to set the tone or interpersonal classroom climate which is needed to learn the target language.
5. The teacher needs to be warm and enthusiastic to teach.

 Methods:

1. Community Language Learning ( CLL) devised by Curran 1972

“Learning another language is probably the most anxiety provoking activity an individual can undertake in the classroom.” (Nunan, 1991)

The primary aim of CLL is to create a genuinely warm and supportive

“ community” among the learners and gradually to move them from complete dependence on the teacher to complete autonomy.” ( Nunan, 1991

The method works in the following way: an homogeneous group of  first language learners work with a bilingual teacher. If a student wants to say something he whispers to the teacher the word he wants to say using L1. The teacher translates the word into L2 and whispers back. The student is able to  repeat the word to the group. These words are recorded and then the tape is replayed, analysed and  used as the basis of more formal language. At the beginning the method was developed to teach a homogeneous group it was then modified to teach  heterogeneous gropus.

The method has been developed to pitch directly at the emotions and attitudes of the learners and one of its weaknesses is that it can release not only positive but also negative emotions if the students feel uncomfortable with the climate generated inside the classrooms.

2. The Silent Way devised by Gattegno 1972

The method developed by Gattegno also establishes the importance of the emotional state of the learner in the learning process.

Students know that they are going to learn a foreign language and the teacher uses only the target language in the classroom. In this case the teacher uses a rod and he shows the rod to the students and he expects the students to say the word “ rod” when they see it. Then the teacher adds color and repeat green rod, red rod etc.

The method is artificial  and it is the spirit of the language that has to get hold of our minds.

“ Like Curran , he emphasizes the need to develop in learners an autonomy from the teacher and the teaching situation. He also claims that the method is learner-centred in that teaching is subordinated to learning. Despite these claims, the method is highly controlled, and extremely manipulative of the students.” (Nunan, 1991)

3.Suggestopedia devised by Lozonov

Lozonov believes  “ that the human mind is capable of prodigious feats of memory if learning takes place under the appropriate conditions. He attempts to realize the hidden potential of the mind by getting students to learn in a state of deep relaxation bordering on hypnosis.” (Nunan, 1991)

Ostrander and Schroeder 1981 suggested that students could learn between 1000- 3000 words a day.

Language Skills Reflection

I think that my strongest skill is writing, because writing gives me the chance to express my opinions without being worried of making mistakes. Whenever I write I normally read the idea and I correct the mistakes that I can notice in my sentence, topic, or essay.
The kind of  visual intelligence I have developed, helps me to remember the expressions that usually go together.I often  read a question and I don't have problems to write about any topic when I have the knowledge  to paraphrase or repeat the most important ideas.
Using the information you sent us with the picture we can see the importance of reading to improve your skill of writing . The more you read,  the better your writing skills will become.

On the other hand, the weakest skill I have is speaking because the ideas I have in my mind are not easily converted into oral language.I usually use less language to express my ideas than I have in my mind  and when I read something it`s incredible the amount of things I am able to understand but when I have to speak about this it´s more difficult.It happens to me even in Spanish . In my case I can improve my weakest skill by trying to speak more and finding moments to express my thoughts in an easy way.

My experience learning English

I started learning English many years ago when I was in the school. It was difficult to speak English because at that time many people felt ashamed to speak a different language. Because of cultural backgrounds many people said that we were living in an Spanish-speaking country so there was no need to learn another language. Not many people spoke English and the ones who did were those who had lived abroad or those who could afford to pay a bilingual school.
In my case I studied at a public school and I learned English with two English teachers who spoke a very good English. I was lucky though because my experience didn´t resemble the reality we had at those times.
I decided to study foreign languages and I started to learn German at the age of 14. I went to university to study German also and I did everything I could to learn to speak this beautiful language.I succeded to master that language but people became more interested to learn English in the schools and not Italian, French or German which were compulsory subjects in most of the schools in Chile. Times had changed, so very fast I decided to begin a new challenge and I began to study English at university.(UChile). It was really hard for me because I was able to understand many things but I was not able to answer.I felt frustrated at the beginning but I was not worried because I knew I could do it.
In my opinion learning new languages helps you to expand your experiences in a different way because you have to make efforts to be understood by native -speakers. It is not enough to study the structures of the language but also you must use the language as a tool of communication.In this part I have tried to improve because in the past I didn't feel comfortable to speak a language knowing that perhaps the person who was near me was not able to understand. It was awkward.But today I feel that I have improved a lot.One of the most important weaknesses that I have is that I don't usually read books in English and it is incredible the amount of words you can learn by reading different kinds of literature.