Summary and Personal Opinion About The Article # 1; Communicative Competence and Communicative Language Teaching .

Communicative Competence and Communicative Language Teaching.

by Atsuko Ohno

This document present an analysis performs by Atsuko Ohno based in the initiative performs by the Japanese government in order to improve second language acquisition that helps the communicative competence between their students.  They use the key concepts communication, communicative competency and communicative language teaching.  The author understood that the interpretations of the meaning are not uniform and he believes there is some confusion.  Based on this he presents a discussion and an analysis of some theoretical concepts and their application for the language and teaching methods.  The four concepts presents are:

1. Hymes concept of communicative competence.
2. Wisdom concepts of communicative language teaching.
3. Canales and Swain theoretical framework of communicative competence.
4. Application of the concept of communicative competence to language teaching.

Below you will find a summary of the concept and my opinion:

Hymes concept of communicative competence.

Summary

The author present that Hyme’s ideas of communicative competence are based in two concepts (competence and performance).  The concept of competence is shared knowledge of the ideal speaker and listener is completely homogeneous.  Where knowledge is define as is when the language is use to produce and understand an infinite set of sentence out of infinite set of rules.  For performance he explain that is the process of apply the underlying knowledge to the actual language uses.

Personal Opinion

My opinion for this section is that for Hymes concept that competence is based in theoretical scenario where both the listener and the speaker need to speak the same language and concept where the listeners capture the same message that the speaker is providing.  As today we know that in most of the case is not true.  We can have speaker trying to express some ideas or concepts on a base and the listener understood other things.  This is cause by the difference between us cause by education, knowledge, opinion and society.  These provoke misunderstood and different opinions between the people involved in the meeting.  But if can uses the performance concept to help the integration of ideas to the society, this will help to improve the integration between the speaker and the listener.

Widderson’s concept communicative language teaching.

Summary

The author explain that Widderson say that knowing a language is more than how to understand ,speak, read and write sentence, but how the sentence are used to communicate.  Also he believes that if you have a lot of time in the instruction process of a language that does not guarantee a normal language communication.  He established that communicative abilities have to be developing at the same time as the linguistic skills.  He strongly suggest that we need to teach communicative competence along linguistic competence.

Personal opinion

I am completely agreed with Widderson opinion.  I believe that if you want to learn a language you need to know the basic concepts and the grammatical rules.  The progress in the language will be acquired with the practice in the field with normal and real situations.

Canale and Swain Theoretical framework of communicative competence.

Summary

Establish that Hymes works are important to the development of communicative approach to the language.  Their work focuses in the interaction of social context, grammar and social meaning.  Canale and Swain maintain that are rules of language use that would be useless without rules of grammar.  They believe that the study of grammatical competence is an essential to the study of communication competence as is the study of sociolinguistic competence.  They believe that the final selection of grammatical, semantic and social behavior are screened by some criteria’s as grammatical complexity, transparency etc.  Canale and Swain propose their own theory of communicative competence that minimal included three main competencies grammatical, sociolinguistic and strategy competence.

Personal opinion

After read and understood the Canale and Swain work I can concluded that this theory is base more in the society interaction.  I believe that the society is the one that is responsible to maintain the language but also can be responsible to transform the language.  If we as a teacher of the language not provide the tools and the base for our student the society and the constant changes will eliminate the uses of the grammatical rules and our children will be writing and speaking in the correct ways.

Theoretical framework of communication competence.

Summary

Stern proposes that the language teaching can and should approach language learning objectively and analytically through the study and practice of structural, functional and sociocultural aspects.  Also Rivers proposes methodological distinction between “skill getting” and skill using activities.  The maintain that the level of teaching skill getting and skill using should not be strict sequencing that a variable focus should be offer.

My personal opinion

After read this section I am agree with both methods of language teaching.  I still believing that the best form to learn and practice a new language should be in the real life experience.  We could have the base but if we don’t practice in the real world the skills will not be develops. 

Final Opinion

We don’t need to go to Japan; here we have the same problem.  English is our second language, we study English for more than twelve years and most of the people don’t talk english.  As soon as we move to a place where the spanish is not the first language we are in the obligation to uses.  Also we can observe how the technology is affected the communication skill between our peoples.  The young people are using constantly the abbreviation in their conversation.  We as a teacher are responsible to teach, maintain and promote the communication skill development using the tools provide by the experts.