An Introduction to Communicative Approach
CONTENT
i. Introduction.
ii. The historical background of communicative approach.
iii. The definition of communicative approach.
a) The goals of language teaching in the frame of communicative approach.
b) The kind of activities in a communicative class room.
c) The role of the teacher in a communicative class room.
d) Materials.
iv. The application of communication approach.
v. Steps to follow in planning a lesson using the communicative approach.
vi. Example of communicative exercises.
- Introduction
Nowadays, English as language becomes the most interested mean to do with any domain, which makes of it the most famous and useful language around the world. For this reason, millions of people have a great deal of eagerness to develop their ways of using it. So opportunities to learn English are provided in many different ways such as: formal institutions, travelling, studying abroad as well as through the media. However, the ever growing need for well communication in English has created a huge demand for improving English-teaching-skills as a foreign language. So, linguists, educators, who have taken into consideration foreign language teaching as target, have done their best to modify the traditional teaching methods especially of English. As a result, the communicative approach is the outcome of their efforts. All this is done in the intention of making student communicatively competent, that is to say to enable learners to use language to communicate in a conscious way.
So in this presentation, we will examine the methodology known as communicative approach and discover its origins as well as explore the characteristics it is based on and its evolutions.
- The historical background of communicative approach.
Its origins are many in so far as one teaching methodology tends to influence the next, the communicative approach could be said to be the product of educators and linguists who had grown dissatisfied with the audio-lingual and grammar-translation methods of foreign language teaching. They felt that students were not learning enough realistic, they did not know how to communicate by using appropriate social language, gestures or expressions. In brief, the students were not able to exchange ideas for real purposes. This urge drives educational decision-makers to rethink and question the grammar-translation method of teaching. Therefore, attentions were shift to communicative competence, that is to say knowledge and skills that secure different purposes of communication; such as, giving advice, making requests and describing wishes and needs.
- The definition of communicative approach.
Communicative approach is a method of teaching that focuses on the idea that language is communication. It emphasises on the learners’ ability to know how to use language appropriately in a specific situations. It tries to make the learners communicatively competent by using language to give advice, make request, agree and disagree, complain, to try to persuade people to do things and so on, the focus should be on meaning rather than a form. Indeed this view of language considers different kinds of competence which make communication really meaningful: linguistic, sociolinguistics, discourse and strategic.
Ø Linguistic competence: is what we usually know as the body of grammatical structures, e.g. phonology and orthography, grammar, vocabulary, discourse (textual)
Ø Sociolinguistic competence: has to do with the social context in which language is used
Ø Discourse competence: refers to the relationship between the elements of language and their proper combinations to convey meaningful outcomes
Ø Strategic competence: relates to the ways we deal with communication appropriately
What we have just said is represented in the figure below.
From this perspective, communicative approach is the theory that language is communication, and the final aim of communicative approach is communicative competence, but many others may say that communicative approach means teaching conversations, an absence grammar in a course, or an emphasis on open-ended discussion activities as the main features of a course
So what do you understand by communicative approach?
Communicative approach can be understood as a set o principals about the objectives of language teaching, the kind of class room, the role of the teacher in a communicative classroom, materials and techniques in the communicative approach, let us examine each of the issues in turn.
a) The goals of language teaching in the frame of communicative approach.
The communicative approach as method of language teaching has so many objectives; the main objective is to help learners to become communicatively competent. What does this term mean? Perhaps we can clarify this term by first comparing it with concept of grammatical competence. Grammatical competence refers to the knowledge we have of a language that account for our ability to produce sentences in a language. It refers to knowledge of building blocks of sentences (e.g. parts of speech, tenses, phrases, clauses, sentence patterns) and how sentences are formed. Grammatical competence is an important dimension of language learning, it is clearly not all that is involved in learning language since one can master the rules of sentence formation in a language and still not be very successful at being able to use the language for meaningful communication. It is the latter capacity which is understood by the term of communicative competence.
Communicative competence includes the following aspects of language knowledge
ü Knowing how to use language for a range of different purposes and functions.
ü Knowing how to vary our use of language according to the setting and the participants. ( e.g. knowing when to use formal and informal speech)
ü Knowing how to maintain communication despite having limitations in one’s language knowledge
ü Knowing how to produce and understand different types of texts (e.g. narratives, reports, interviews, conversations…)
Other objectives which seems to be more specific and derived in part from the one just mentioned are:
ü To communicate in the target language with suitable fluency and accuracy.
ü To develop the four basic skills from a communicative stand point.
ü To train the learners in the ability to express not only ideas and opinions but also judgments and needs.
b) The kind of activities in a communicative class room.
In the communicative approach, the class room activities should be directed to help students to avoid the problems that prevent them from being actively involved in the learning process by the use of pair work activities, group work activities and project work.
Communicative approach develops a kind of a class room activities that focus on fluency and accuracy by pushing students to negotiate meaning, use communication strategies, correct misunderstanding and work to avoid communication break downs, moreover, class room activities should be meaningful and communicative; to clarify more, the activities should provide a meaningful practice where students are required to make meaningful choices when carrying out a practice. For example, in order to practice the use of prepositions to describe locations of places, student might be given a street map with a various buildings identified in different locations, they are also given a list of prepositions such as: across from, on the corner of, near, on and next to. They then have to answer questions such as “where is the book shop?”, “where is the café?” The practice is now meaningful because they have to respond according to the locations of places on the map.
In addition, the activities performed in the class room should be communicative, and carry out exchange of information in context where every thing is predictable, for example, students might have to draw a map of their neighborhood, and answer questions about the location of different places in the neighborhood, such as the nearest bus stop, the nearest supermarket.
