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Asignatura: Idioma estranger i la seva didàctica I (anglés), Profesor: Manuel Albaladejo, Carrera: Mestre: Especialitat de Llengua Estrangera, Universidad: UA
Tipo: Apuntes
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Lesson 4. The Communicative methodology. The notional-functional method. The task-based teaching. Communicative activities: projects, simulations, etc.
I. INTRODUCTION. II. HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE. III. EVOLUTION OF THE CONCEPT OF COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE. IV. THE COMMUNICATIVE METHODOLOGY.
V. PEDAGOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS OF THE COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH.
What does it mean to know a language? Does it mean knowing the rules of the linguistic system? Does it mean speaking fluently regardless of our correction? Many theories and approaches to foreign language teaching and learning try to find a convincing answer to such questions.
In the long search for the best way of teaching a foreign language, a great number of approaches and methods has been developed. Certain methods have become widely recognised, due to their influential role in the history of foreign language teaching. As we have already seen in the previous lesson, the Grammar- translation Method, the Natural Method, the Direct Method or the Audio-lingual Method are some of the most relevant methods traditionally used in the area of foreign language teaching.
However, as a result of the consolidation of the European Union, and of the greater influence of Pragmatics within Linguistics, during the 1970’s there was a strong reaction against methods that stressed the teaching of grammatical forms and that paid little or no attention to the way language is used in everyday situations. Therefore, an increasing concern developed to make foreign language teaching more communicative.
With Hymes’s approach, we have taken a first step towards the enlarging of competence. In the next sections, we will see how the definition and elements of the communicative competence have become increasingly complex.
Hymes’s concept of communicative competence underwent critical study when it was specifically applied to second language acquisition.
In 1980, CANALE AND SWAIN further studied the concept of communicative competence. This time, they divided it into 3 components:
GRAMMATICAL COMPETENCE : understood as the mastery of the linguistic code (as Chomsky and Hymes did)
SOCIOLINGUISTIC COMPETENCE : defined as the appropriateness of utterances with respect to both meaning and form (with a different label, but also inherited from previous theories).
PRAGMATIC COMPENTENCE : a new concept having to do with the mastery to combine linguistic and non-linguistic elements to foster communicative efficiency.
In 1983, CANALE on his own took up again the task of analysing the concept, providing us with the currently most extensive and accepted theory about communicative competence.
He began by defining the NATURE OF COMMUNICATION with the following features:
word formation, sentence formation, pronunciation, spelling and semantics. Such competence focuses directly on the knowledge and skill required to understand and express accurately the literal meaning of utterances. For many years, this competence has been the single and only aim of second and foreign language programmes.
2. SOCIOLINGUISTIC COMPETENCE addresses the extent to which utterances are produced and understood appropriately in different sociolinguistic contexts depending on contextual factors such as status of participants, purposes of the interaction, and norms or conventions of interaction.
Appropriateness of utterances, the key concept within sociolinguistic competence, refers to both appropriateness of meaning and appropriateness of form. On the one hand, appropriateness of meaning refers to the extent to which particular communicative functions (e.g. complaining, commanding, etc.), attitudes (politeness and formality) and ideas are to be judged to be proper in a given situation. In other words, if I want to offer a book I’ve written to a publisher, I can invite them to read it, but I cannot command or impose my will.
On the other hand, appropriateness of form concerns the extent to which a given meaning is represented in a verbal and/or non-verbal form that is proper in a given sociolinguistic context. For example, I cannot encourage the publisher to read my book with “OK, chaps, this is the best stuff you’ve ever read”.
There is a tendency in many second language programmes to treat sociolinguistic competence as less important than grammatical competence, though in the last years this tendency has been reversed.
3. DISCOURSE COMPETENCE concerns the mastery of how to combine grammatical forms and meanings to achieve a unified spoken or written text in different genres or types of texts such as a scientific report, an oral review, a spontaneous conversation, a business letter, etc. That unity of a text or textuality is achieved through several devices, cohesion and coherence being the most important.
Whereas coherence refers to the internal conceptual stability (logic at the semantic level), cohesion refers to the external organisation, the structural form of the text. According to Halliday and Hasan, this unity of cohesion is achieved through connectors and textual repetition.
4. The last component of the communicative competence is STRATEGIC COMPETENCE. It is composed of mastery of verbal and non-verbal communication strategies that may be called into action for many reasons. a) to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to limiting conditions in actual communication or to insufficient competence in one or more of the other areas of communicative competence and b) to enhance the effectiveness of communication. Theses strategies can be cooperative (when the help of he interlocutor is sought) and non-cooperative (when the speaker tries to solve the problem by himself). Cooperative strategies include asking for repetition, clarification or confirmation; whereas non-cooperative strategies include paraphrasing, clarification, use of words from the same semantic field, etc.
In order to create a course or syllabus that can be considered as communicative, we have to bear in mind a number of principles that will guide the teaching and learning of any foreign language:
Therefore, communicative activities are those activities that encourage students participate in real communicative situations, in which learners must attain a specific objective that is motivating and meaningful from the point of view of the learner’s interests and preferences: to sing a song about their family or body; to write a letter to a friend; to talk about their best friend, their town, their possessions, etc.; to read about their favourites stories and characters; to listen to stories and songs related to their age and interests; etc.
In conclusion, the number of activities to be used in a communicative classroom is endless, as far as they engage learners in communication, since the learners are seen as active participants in the process of language learning in the
classroom individually, in pairs, or in small and big groups. Thus, the language- using activities for communication are not restricted to conversation and may involve listening, speaking, reading, writing or an integration of two or more skills.
Most of the communicative activities used in a foreign language classroom are based in the information-gap principle. In any information-gap activity, one of our pupils knows something that another pupil needs to know in order to carry out the activity. By means of negotiation, interaction and information transfer techniques, the gap will be bridged.
Finally, Jeremy Harmer (1982) has defined a set of characteristics that communicative activities share:^1
A desire to communicate A communicative purpose Content no form Variety of language No teacher intervention No control of materials
He has also divided communicative activities into oral and written:
(^1) Jeremy Harmer, “What is communicative”, in ELT Journal , Vol. 36 (3), pp. 164-168, 1982.
of the forms they use. Following the taxonomy designed by Littlewood (1981), we distinguish two types of activities: pre-communicative and communicative.
a) PRE-COMMUNICATIVE ACTITIVITES: The teacher explains specific elements of knowledge or skills and provides the students with opportunities to practice them in isolation. Thus, the students practice partial skills rather than all the skills involved in real communication. Examples of this kind of activity include repetition, transformation, gap-filling, true and false questions and other oral and written questions, whose only purpose is to master the linguistic forms used without asking our students to fulfil real communicative ends. The main objective is to produce appropriate linguistic structures rather than communicating meanings effectively.
b) COMMUNICATIVE ACTIVITIES: In the communicative activities, the students activate and integrate their pre-communicative knowledge and skills to use them in order to express meanings in real and simulated communicative situations. Examples of this sort of activities are: simulations, improvisation, dialogues controlled in different degrees, description of images, narration of events, debates, etc.
The purpose of the pre-communicative activities is to prepare the students for the later communication. A typical lesson organisation is divided in 3 stages: Presentation, Practice and Production. The pre-communicative tasks will be developed in the Presentation and Practice stages, so that the teacher can check whether the students have acquired the new linguistic forms and structures, whereas the communicative tasks will be put forward so that the students put in practice the new language in order to carry out a specific function or purpose. In short, our students progress from controlled practice to creative use of the language.
