Exploring Communicative Competence Development in an EFLT Classroom at Cursos Libres

ARTÍCULO DE INVESTIGACIÓN RESEARCH REPORT Exploring Communicative Competence Development in an EFLT Classroom at Cursos Libres zona Exploración del Desarrollo de la Competencia Comunicativa en un Salón de Enseñanza del Inglés como Lengua Extranjeras de Cursos Libres próxima Magola Moreno Wilmar Salazar Obeso zona próxima Revista del Instituto de Estudios en Educación Universidad del Norte nº 23 julio-diciembre, 2015 ISSN 2145-9444 (electrónica) http://dx.doi.org/10.14482/zp.22.5832 WILMAR SALAZAR OBESO Licenciado en Lenguas Modernas (Español-Inglés), Universidad del Atlántico (Colombia). Magíster en la Enseñanza del Inglés, Universidad del Norte (Colombia). Docente catedrático en el Programa de Idiomas Extranjeros de la Universidad del Atlántico. f e c h a d e r e c e p c i ó n : 11 de febrero de 2015 f e c h a d e a c e p t a c i ó n : 12 de agosto de 2015 RESUMEN Keywords: communicative competence, communicative language teaching, interaction, materials evaluation, tasks, teacher’s mediation. A BSTRA CT The present article is intended to report on a study carried out with students of level three at Cursos Libres. The research focused mainly on describing how the materials and the methodology implemented by the teacher contributed to the development of the students’ Communicative Competence. To reach that research objective, an ethnographic case study design was used. Observations, interviews to students and teacher were employed as data collection instruments. The results are expected to contribute to the issue of the development of Communicative Competence in classroom contexts. Se pretende en el siguiente artículo presentar el estudio realizado a los estudiantes de tercer nivel de los Cursos Libres. La investigación se centró principalmente en describir como el libro guía y la metodología implementada por el docente contribuyó al desarrollo de la Competencia Comunicativa de dichos estudiantes. Para la consecución de tal objetivo de investigación, se empleó un enfoque cualitativo con un diseño etnográfico de estudio de caso. Se realizaron observaciones, entrevistas a los estudiantes y al docente como instrumentos de recolección de datos. Se espera que los resultados contribuyan al desarrollo de la competencia comunicativa en contexto de aula. Palabras claves: competencia comunicativa, evaluación de materiales, actividades, mediación docente, enseñanza comunicativa de la lengua e interacción. Sandra Lorena Hidalgo Arango, Alfredo J. Pérez Caballero linguistic performance is a manifestation of such competence (Hymes, 1972). These types of rules can allow speakers to use the appropriate communicative behavior to convey social meaning (Paulston, 1992). Besides, Communicative Competence depends on both knowledge and ability for language use (Munby, 1982). INTRODUCTION The application of Communicative Competence notion and its different proposed models has become a fruitful research issue for Language Teaching (LT). This is the central notion behind the standards of competences in English according to the ministry of Education and therefore it is the goal for the Colombian schools. It is not clear, however, how in particular contexts, this competence is taught. The research reported here aims at describing how the materials and the methodology implemented by a third level teacher at the Cursos Libres contribute to the development of the students’ Communicative Competence. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK In this section the concept of communicative competence and communicative language teaching are defined taking into account different models proposed in the last decades. Materials evaluation, as well as the notions of tasks and activities will also be discussed since they are central in this study. Communicative Competence and proposed models For Chomsky (1965), linguistic competence accounts for the implicit knowledge of grammar an ideal speaker and listener has in a homogenous speech community (ideal speaker-listener), whereas linguistic performance refers to the current use of that grammar knowledge in specific situations. In other words, linguistic competence relates to language and linguistic performance refers to speech (Johnson, 2004). On the other hand, the notion of Communicative Competence highlights the functional aspects of language (rules of use) where 90 Among the existing models of Communicative Competence, two important ones have been proposed to understand and operationalize such a notion for teaching purposes. According to Brown (2007), Canale and Swain’s (1980) model includes four components of Communicative Competence: Grammatical competence, which refers to “knowledge of lexical items and of rules of morphology, syntax, sentence-grammar semantics, and phonology” (Canale & Swain, 1980, p. 40); discourse competence, which accounts for the ability to connect sentences to build a coherent discourse into a meaningful whole (Brown, 2007); sociolinguistic competence, which relates to Hymes’ social rules of language use. That is, any utterance is built within a socio-cultural context which defines it. Finally, strategic competence, according to Canale and Swain (1983) relates to “the verbal and nonverbal communication strategies that may be called into action to compensate for breakdowns in communication” (p. 40-41). This strategy is employed by speakers to compensate for imperfect knowledge of rules (Savignon, 1997). In a more detailed model, Bachman (1991) proposes Language Competence, which shows the relationships among three categories: organizational competence which covers grammatical competence (vocabulary, morphology, syntax, phonology and graphology) and textual competence (cohesion and rhetorical organization). On the other hand, pragmatic competence is constituted by illocutory competence (ideational, Z O N A P R Ó X I M A N º 23 (2015) PÁGS. 88-103 ISSN 2145-9444 (electrónica) Exploración del Desarrollo de la Competencia Comunicativa en un Salón de Enseñanza del Inglés como Lengua Extranjeras de Cursos Libres manipulative, heuristic and imaginative functions) and sociolinguistic competence (sensitivity to differences in dialect or variety, sensitivity to differences in register, sensitivity to naturalness, and ability to interpret cultural references and figures of speech). For Bachman, Strategic competence is related to “a general ability, which enables an individual to make the most effective use of available abilities in carrying out a given task” (p.106). 4. A level of individual learning needs (remedial learning based on error analysis); 5. A general educational level of extra-linguistic goals (language learning within the school curriculum). The attainability of these objectives as possible guidelines that direct classroom realization has not been easy since every context has its own characteristics. The model of Communicative Competence used as framework for data analysis in the present study is composed of five com (...truncated)