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分享和反思
分享一篇英语教学方面的文章:塑造沟通能力。最近观察琪琪的外教课,让我产生了很多疑惑,这篇文章凑巧回答了我心中的问题,简直是字字句句都说到我的心坎里去。
跟大家分享一下。
Fostering Communicative Competence
One possible solution to bridge the gap between classroom language teaching and real life language use is the adoption of communicative language teaching, which has in recent years become a fashionable term to cover a variety of developments in syllabus design and in the methodology of foreign language teaching. The goal of CLT is to develop students’ communicative competence, which includes both the knowledge about the language and the knowledge about how to use the language appropriately in communicative situations.
The term communicative competence is used in contrast to Noam Chomsky’s term linguistic competence, which is understood as the tacit knowledge of language struc¬ture and the ability to use this knowledge to understand and produce language. For Chomsky, competence simply means knowledge of the language system: grammatical knowledge in other words. However, if we look at how language is used in real com¬munication, we have to accept that real language use involves far more than knowl¬edge and ability for grammaticality. In Hymes’s (1979:15) words, there are “rules of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless”, which simply means, be¬sides grammatical rules, language use is governed by rules of use, which ensure that the desired or intended functions are performed and the language used is appropriate to the context.
According to Hymes (1979), communicative competence includes four aspects:
1) Knowing whether or not something is formally possible (grammatically acceptable), which is roughly equivalent to Chomsky’s linguistic competence;
2) Knowing whether something is understandable to human beings;
3) Knowing whether something is in line with social norms;
4) Knowing whether or not something is in fact done: Do people actually use language this way?
In other words, communicative competence entails knowing not only the language code or the form of language, but also what to say to whom and how to say it appropriately in any given situation. Communicative competence includes knowledge of what to say, when, how, where, and to whom.
Based on the concept of communicative competence and aiming at developing such competence, communicative language teaching has the following features:
1) It stresses the need to allow students opportunities for authentic and creative use of the language.
2) It focuses on meaning rather than form.
3) It suggests that learning should be relevant to the needs of the students.
4) It advocates task-based language teaching. Students should be given tasks to per¬form or problems to solve in the classroom.
5) It emphasizes a functional approach to language learning (i.e. what people do with language, such as inviting, apologizing, greeting and introducing, etc.). Also, to be competent in the target language, learners should acquire not only linguistic knowledge, but also the culture of that language.
Although people’s understanding of communicative language teaching varies, the fol¬lowing three principles, which have been suggested by Richards and Rodgers (1986:72), have been generally agreed upon:
1) Communication principle: Activities that involve real communication promote learning.
2) Task principle: Activities in which language is used for carrying out meaningful tasks promote learning.
3) Meaningfulness principle: Language that is meaningful to the learner supports the learning process.
(王蔷. 2000. 英语教学法教程. 北京: 高等教育出版社.) |
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