Teaching English as a Foreign or Second Language, Second Edition: A Teacher Self-Development and Methodology Guide

4. Teaching Language as Communication among People

Language and learning and teaching can be an exciting and refreshing interval in the day for students and teacher. There are so many possible ways of stimulating communicative interaction, yet, all over the world, one still finds classrooms where language learning is a tedious, dry-as-dust process, devoid of contact with the real world in which language use is as natural as breathing. —Rivers 1987, 14 4 Teaching Language as Communication among People • What is the main goal of a communicative classroom? • How do EFL/ESL teachers provide opportunities for students to communicate in English? • What makes a classroom communicative? • What roles are native and near-native English-speaking EFL/ESL teachers expected to play? • What problems do some EFL/ESL teachers face when teaching English as communication among people? What Is the Main Goal of a Communicative Classroom? The primary goal of a communicative classroom is student development of communicative competence in English. At a basic level, this includes development of students’ ability to comprehend and produce written and spoken English in communicatively proficient and accurate ways. 63 Influenced by the thinking of Dell Hymes,1 Michael Canal and Merrill Swain,2 and especially Sandra Savignon,3 communicative competence has four interrelated components—grammatical, discourse , socio-cultural, and strategic competency. To have grammatical competency means to be able to recognize sentence-level grammatical forms, including lexical items (vocabulary/ words), morphological items (smallest units of meaning, such as re- meaning again in remind), syntactic features (word order), and phonological features (consonant and vowel sounds, intonation patterns , and other aspects of the sound system). Communicative competence also includes discourse competency, or the ability to interconnect a series of utterances (written or spoken ) to form a meaningful text (letter, e-mail, essay, telephone conversation , formal speech, or joke). This includes being able to use both top-down (knowledge based on experience and context) and bottom-up (knowledge of grammatical forms) processing. (See Part 3 of this book, Teaching Language Skills, for more discussion on top-down and bottom-up processing.) According to Sandra Savignon discourse competency also includes text coherence and cohesion. She defines coherence as “the relation of all sentences or utterances in a text to a single global proposition (or topic).”4 While coherence establishes a global meaning or topic, cohesion provides the smaller structural links between individual sentences, such as in the use of first, second, next, and after this.5 The third component of communicative competence is sociocultural competency, which is the ability to use English in social contexts in culturally appropriate ways. In Chapter 7, Culture and the Language Teacher, the importance of being able to adjust to the way people in different cultures and subcultures interact is discussed. When do people compliment each other? How often? What kinds of things do they compliment? What kind of verbal and nonverbal behaviors do they use? The same kinds of questions can be asked about other functions of language, such as when apologizing, complaining , interrupting, asking for permission, requesting, and turning down an invitation. Developing socio-cultural competency means being able to adapt the use of English to the ways people in any culture interact. For example, if an Egyptian were living in Toronto, then he or she would need to adapt to the socio-cultural rules for using English in Toronto. However, if this same person moves to Tokyo, the socio-cultural rules when using English change. Sociocultural competency becomes most interesting when people from 64 TEACHING ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN OR SECOND LANGUAGE different cultures, such as people from Taiwan, Korea, and Thailand, interact in a context outside any of their own native cultures, as in rural western Pennsylvania. Do they follow the rules used by Americans in rural western Pennsylvania? Or do they create their own rules based partly on the common features of their cultures? Finally, communicative competence includes strategic competency, or the ability to cope with breakdowns in communication, to problemsolve in unfamiliar contexts when communication fails, and to draw on strategies that help restore communication. Examples of such strategies include knowing how to explain directions by drawing a map, knowing how to ask someone to repeat what she said in different words, paraphrasing to check understanding, and being able to guess the meaning of words (in print or speech) from the context. How Do EFL/ESL Teachers Provide Opportunities for Students to Communicate in English? Some EFL/ESL classes are...