What is the Matter with Communicative Competence?: An Analysis to Encourage Teachers of English to Assess the Very Basis of Their Teaching

Front Cover
LIT Verlag Münster, 2005 - 343 pages
This book integrates recent findings of linguistic research into ELT. Its aim is - to introduce (future) teachers to the complex concept of communicative competence - to critically analyse learners' teaching/learning deficiencies in the light of the requirements they are expected to meet at the school-leaving exams or at university-entry - to offer suggestions about how to remedy these shortcomings and also to provide teaching and testing materials.
 

Contents

3 More efficiency in vocabulary acquisition
142
4 Enhancing textual competence
200
5 Integrating pragmatics
233
6 On the teachability of strategic competence
286
Conclusion
299
Appendices
305
Examples of tasks set by me at schoolleaving exams Reifeprüfungen at the Bundesrealgymnasium Linz Hamerlingstraße
306
Examples of teaching materials used in my university language courses in English for business
310

Questionnaire about grammar school pupils behaviour in lexical acquisition
318
PART THREE
325
Bibliography
326
Index
337
Acknowledgements
343
Copyright

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Page 10 - We have then to account for the fact that a normal child acquires knowledge of sentences, not only as grammatical, but also as appropriate. He or she acquires competence as to when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom, when, where, in what manner. In short, a child becomes able to accomplish a repertoire of speech acts, to take part in speech events, and to evaluate their accomplishment by others. This competence, moreover, is integral with attitudes, values, and motivations...
Page 9 - A distinction must be made between what the speaker of a language knows implicitly (what we may call his competence) and what he does (his performance}.
Page 9 - The competence of the speaker-hearer can, ideally, be expressed as a system of rules that relate signals to semantic interpretations of these signals. The problem for the grammarian is to discover this system of rules ; the problem for linguistic theory is to discover general properties of any system of rules that may serve as the basis for a human language, that is, to elaborate in...
Page xiii - The advantage of the notional syllabus is that it takes the communicative facts of language into account from the beginning without losing sight of grammatical and situational factors.
Page 10 - Hymes provides us with a much broader definition of competence which is intended to account for the fact that a normal child acquires knowledge of sentences, not only as grammatical, but also as appropriate.
Page 9 - A grammar, in the traditional view, is an account of competence. It describes and attempts to account for the ability of a speaker to understand an arbitrary sentence of his language and to produce an appropriate sentence on a given occasion. If it is a pedagogic grammar, it attempts to provide the student with this ability; if a linguistic grammar, it aims to discover and exhibit the mechanisms that make this achievement possible.

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