（英语语言文学专业论文）中国大学英语教学中交际能力的培养.pdf

1 acknowledgements this paper would not have been here without the instruction and enlightening comments of my supervisor, prof. cheng xinghua. im greatly grateful to him for his valuable suggestions and for his patience in reading and correcting the paper. im also grateful to all the authors i cited in my writing. i would also like to thank mr. hua qingliang, dean of english department in henan college of education for his support during my study in shanghai and work in zhengzhou as well. lastly, i want to say thanks to my family, especially to my husband, for their consideration, care and love during my stay in shanghai. 2 abstract since the early 1970s, communicative language teaching has been widely discussed. communicative competence is its desired goal. this paper argues that there is no best method. the task of the teacher is to find a better one under particular circumstances. the “weak version” of the communicative approach is more effective in improving the four basic language skills of the college english students in china. communicative activities and techniques take the major part of the class hour; other kinds of activities and techniques are also introduced. the ultimate goal of teaching is to cultivate in students both linguistic competence and communicative competence. 3 内容提要 自七十年代早期以来 交际教学法在欧美就得到了 广泛的讨论培养交际能力是其目标在中国大学英语 教学特别是英语专业教学中温和模式的交际法还 是可行的虽然还有很多困难结合实际本文认为除 了纯交际活动以外在英语课堂上其它类型的语言活 动也是必不可少的教师的最终目标是通过这些活动和 技巧既要提高学生的语言能力又要提高他们的交际能 力 6 introduction with the deepening of chinas policy of reform and opening-up, and with chinas entry into wto in the near future, english, as an international language, is becoming increasingly important. as a result, english teaching is playing an important role in college education. but the problem is that many college students after receiving 3 or 4-year formal education are still unable to express themselves fluently and appropriately either in oral or written english. they are structurally competent but communicatively incompetent. many teachers have tried various methods but the results are not satisfactory. it has been widely accepted that communication is the primary function of language. since the early 1970s, communicative language teaching has been widely discussed. communicative competence is its desired goal. in china, english is taught as a foreign language. can the communicative approach be employed in english teaching in china? the answer is affirmative. the communicative approach 7 has rich theoretical bases. the paper argues that the weak version of the communicative approach is applicable and effective in college english teaching in china. the emphasis of teaching should be placed on the communicative language ability rather than on the only mastery of the language form. teaching english communicatively doesnt mean that the pedagogic principle of grading should be thrown away. this paper consists of five chapters. chapter 1 explains some basic concepts about communicative competence. chapter 2 is about language functions, which is one of the theoretical bases of communicative approach. chapter 3 deals with the communicative language ability: the four basic language skills are discussed briefly and integrated skills are advocated. chapter 4 provides a general characterization of the communicative approach. chapter 5 focuses on the communicative college english teaching in china. a sample teaching plan is given at the end of this part. 8 chapter1 concept of communicative competence what is competence? what is communicative competence? in order to have a full understanding of the complex term, well discuss the concept from the point of view of noam chomsky, dell hymes, canale and swain respectively. 1.1 chomskys notion of competence it is chomsky who first put forward the notion of competence in reaction against the view of language learning as habit formation by skinner, which is later applied to language teaching/learning by structural linguists like bloomfield, fries. based on structural linguistics, it was believed that learning a language was achieved by building up habits on the basis of stimulus-response chains. the way of building up the habits was to provide unremitting practice-the sentence patterns repeated and drilled until they became a habitual and automatic as those of the mother tongue. so language teaching should put emphasis on the drills of sentence patterns. the audio-lingual method embodies this particular view of language. in his aspects of the theory of syntax, chomsky holds that 9 “linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in the completely homogeneous speech community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.”(chomsky 1965:3) according to chomsky, there are a finite number of rules that all native speakers know. with these rules, it is possible to create an infinite number of grammatically correct sentences. chomsky calls the knowledge of these rules competence and the realization of the rules in sentence performance. a difference is made between a persons knowledge of the language (competence) and how a person uses this knowledge in producing and understanding sentences (performance). chomskys notion of competence is linguistic competence or grammatical competence. 1.2 hymes theory of communicative competence chomskys notion of competence and the relationship between it and performance has been widely discussed, and the work of hymes in particular has been extremely influential in 10 steering development in second-language theory and practice. it is dell hymes, the american sociolinguistist first coined the term communicative competence in contrast with chomskys notion of competence. according to hymes, chomskys notion of competence is too limited (chomsky defines it as the ability of an ideal native-speaker to construct and recognize grammatical and only grammatical sentences in his language.), and not sufficient to enable a speaker to use the language effectively since it neglects social cultural appropriateness of the speakers specific language context. “there are rules of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless.”(hymes 1971) hymes theory of communicative competence includes four aspects: a. whether (and to what degree) something is formally possible; b. whether (and to what degree) something is feasible in virtue of the means of implementation available; c. whether (and to what degree) something is appropriate (adequate, happy, successful) in relation to a context in which it is used and evaluated. d. whether (and to what degree) something is in fact done, actually performed, and what is doing entails. 11 (hymes 1972:281) the first sector is very much like chomskys competence. it is the ability to produce grammatical sentences. the second sector deals with feasibility. a sentence like she has been being beaten is grammatically possible, but a native speaker will not produce such a sentence because he knows this is not feasible in real life. the third sector discusses the concept of appropriateness that plays a central role in the four points. a sentence can be grammatically possible, feasible but inappropriate to context. for example, the sentence shut the door, will you? may sound inappropriate if one is speaking to a stranger on a train whereas excuse me, would you mind closing the door? may be appropriate. the final sector relates to the area of occurrence. a sentence may be possible, feasible, and appropriate but never occurs. thus, hymes theory of communicative competence involves interaction among grammatical (formally possible), psycholinguistic (implementationally feasible), sociocultural (contextually appropriate) and probabilistic (actually occurring) language components. hymes competence covers a much wider range than chomskys. while chomsky takes competence to mean the knowledge of a user about his language, hymes extends it to cover both tacit knowledge and ability for use. in his 12 formulation, communicative competence enables one to know when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom, when, where, in what manner (hymes 1972:277). 1.3 canale and swains communicative competence in recent years, sociolinguists have made some progress in the research of communicative competence. many linguists have defined communicative competence from different aspects. among the definitions, canale and swains is most commonly accepted. according to canale and swain, four different components make up the construct of communicative competence. they are grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence and strategic competence. grammatical competence refers to the aspect of communicative competence that encompasses “knowledge of lexical items and of rules of morphology, syntax, sentence-grammar, semantics and phonology. (canale and swain 1980) sociolinguistic competence refers to the understanding of the social context in which communication takes place, including role relationship, the shared information of the participants and the 13 communicative purpose for their interaction. discourse competence, the complement of grammatical competence in many ways, is the ability we have to connect sentences in stretches of discourse and to form a meaningful whole out of a series of utterances. discourse means everything from simple spoken conversation to lengthy written texts. while grammatical competence focuses on sentence-level grammar, discourse competence is concerned with intersentential relationships. strategic competence refers to the coping strategies that communicators employ to initiate, terminate, maintain, repair and redirect communication. compared with the definitions given by other theorists before them, canale and swain added a new dimension to their concept, that is, strategic competence. they described it as the verbal and non-verbal communication strategies that may be called into action to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to performance variables or due to insufficient competence. (1980: 30) 14 chapter 2 the functions of language what is a language function? it is what we want to use a language to do. everyone who uses the language must have a pragmatic purpose. for example, how are you? is usually a language form functioning as a way of greeting. would you like to pass me that magazine? is another form functioning as a request. while forms are manifestation of language, functions are the roles of these forms. the culmination of language learning, however, is not simply the mastery of the forms of language, but the mastery of forms in order to accomplish the communicative functions of language. a language learner needs to understand what the purpose of communicative act is and how to achieve that purpose through linguistic forms. 2.1 functions of language chomskys well-known distinction between linguistic competence and linguistic performance, although modified subsequently, provided in its original form, a powerful stimulus for many new theoretical developments in linguistics as well as sociolinguistic research concerned with language 15 use, language acquisition and second-language learning. but his limitations on the scope of linguistics have not been universally accepted. in particular, the work of many british linguists is centrally concerned with language in actual use. “linguistics is concerned with the description of speech acts or texts, since only through the study of language in use are all functions of language, and therefore all components of meaning brought into focus.” (halliday 1970: 145, quoted in richards write letters; speak on the telephone; listen to the radio, etc. in most general way we can identify four major skills: understanding speech (listening), speaking, reading and writing. 3.1.1 division of the four skills in this section, well discuss briefly the four main language “skills”. the division of the four skills can be clearly illustrated by the diagram given below. medium skill (aural) speech (visual) written word receptive/ passive listening on one day students will concentrate on reading, and reading only, on the next speaking and only speaking, etc. in fact this position is clearly ridiculous for two reasons. firstly it is very often true that one skill can not be performed without another. it is impossible to speak in a conversation if you do not listen as well, and people seldom write without reading-even if they only read what they have just 24 written. someone who listens to a lecture may take notes and write a report of the lecture. the same person might also describe the lecture to his friends or colleagues, and follow it up by reading an article that the lecturer suggested. another case would be that of a person who reads about a concert or play in the paper and invites a friend to go with him. the same person will probably read the program for the concert/play and talk with his guest. later he may well write a letter to someone telling of the experience. in these cases, and in many cases, the same experience or topic leads to the use of many different skills. in an english class, the teacher can focus on one skill at certain stage that leads to practise in another. in language teaching, its the teachers responsibility to see that all the skills of the students are practised. so here we advocate the integration (harmer 1983) or the combination (widdowson 1978) of the skills. the term “integrated” or “integrative” is used to convey two ideas: a. generally, the abilities are used together. we generally listen and speak or write, read and speak, or read and write. b. the discrete elements are combined in appropriate informational and meaningful sequences in speech acts or in longer units of discourse and text. 25 3.2 communicative language abilities the earlier division of the language skills is inadequate. bachman criticized it by saying that skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing) were distinguished from components of language (grammar, vocabulary, phonology/graphology), but did not indicate how skills and knowledge are related; and a more serious limitation of the division was its failure to recognize the full context of language use-the contexts of discourse and situation. communicative language ability (cla) can be described as consisting of both knowledge, or competence, and the capacity for implementing, or executing that competence in appropriate, contextualized communicative language use. bachman (1990) illustrated the interactions of the components of cla with the language use context and language users knowledge structures in next figure adapted below: 26 knowledge structures language competence (knowledge of the world) (knowledge of language) strategic competence psychophysiological mechanisms context of situation figure: (components of communicative language ability in communicative language use) communicative language ability consists of language competence, strategic competence, and psychophysiological mechanisms. language competence includes organizational competence, which consists of grammatical and textual competence, and pragmatic competence, which consists of illocutionary and sociolinguistic competence. strategic competence is seen as the capacity that relates language competence, or knowledge of language, to the language users knowledge of language, to the features of the context in which communication takes place. strategic competence performs assessment, planning, and execution functions in determining the most effective means of achieving a communicative goal. 27 psychosiological mechanisms involved in language use characterize the channel (auditory, visual) and mode (receptive, productive) in which communicative competence is implemented. the description here is in consistent with the theory of the work of hymes, canale and swain, halliday, searle, etc. mentioned above. the communicative competence explained by bachman is much like that of canale and swain, except for strategic competence. 28 chapter 4 communicative approach the communicative approach (the terms notional-functional approach or functional approach are sometimes used) appeared in 1970s in europe. it was proposed by the members of european economic community for the purpose of meeting increasing needs of foreign languages in frequent international contact among nations. its early advocates were british linguists d. a. wilkins (notional syllabuses, 1976), h. g. widdowson (teaching language as communication, 1978), etc. they saw the necessity to focus in language teaching on communicative proficiency rather than on more mastery structures and shared the same idea that students at first should learn the fundamental common core in language functions. it was suggested, particularly, that language was much more appropriately classified in terms of what people wanted to deal with the language (functions) or in terms of what meanings people wanted to convey (notions) than in terms of the grammatical items as in traditional language teaching model. the com