English Department

Second Year

ELT

Inst.Afraa Husam Sami

Teaching Language as Communication among People

Language and learning and teaching can be an exciting and refreshing interval in the day for
students and teachers. 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.

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 the development of students’ ability to
comprehend and produce written and spoken English in communicatively proficient and accurate
ways. Influenced by the thinking of Dell Hymes, Michael Canal and Merrill Swain, and especially
Sandra Savignon, 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.
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).” 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.

The third component of communicative competence is sociocultural competency, which is the

ability to use English in social contexts in culturally appropriate ways, 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 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 problem solve 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 to understand, and being able to guess the meaning
of words (in print or speech) from the context.