IdentifyingCommunicative

Strategies

By M.Ed Josué Sánchez Marín

What is the Communicative Competence?

• It is the intuitive functional knowledge and control of the principles of language usage.

• It has four components.

LINGUISTIC

•Grammar, vocabulary and conventions of itswritten representation.

SOCIOLINGUISTIC

•Knowledge of sociocultural rules of use, i.e. knowinghow to use and respond appropriately.

DISCOURSE

• It deals with organizing words, phrases and sentences in order to create conversations, speeches, poetry, email messages, newspaper articles etc.

STRATEGIC

• It is the ability to recognize and repair communication breakdowns before, during, or after they occur.

Student’s and teacher’srole(?)

Student’s:

•The role of learner as negotiator (between the self, the learning process, and the object of learning) emerges from and interacts with the role of joint negotiator within the classroom procedures and activities which the group undertakes.

Teacher’s:

•Facilitator of communication process

•Some secondary roles:

-Organizer of resources and as a resource him/herself.

-A guide of the class procedures and activities.

-Researcher and learner.

Howwould you representthose components?

Communicative Strategies(How can we identify them?)

• Everything that is done is done with a communicative intent.

• Students use the language a great deal through communicative activities such as games, role plays, and problem-solving tasks.

• The use of authentic materials.

• It is considered desirable to give students an opportunity to develop strategies for understanding language as it is actually used.

• Activities are often carried out by students in small groups. Small numbers of students interacting are favored in order to maximize the time allotted to each student for communicating.

What are the features of truly communicative Activities proposed by Morrow (in Johnson and Morrow

1981)?

Information Gap

•It exists when one person in an exchange knows something the other person does not.

Choice

•the speaker has a choice of what she will say and how she will say it. If the exercise is tightly controlled so that students can only say something in one way, the speaker has no choice and the exchange, therefore, is not communicative.

Feedback

•A speaker can thus evaluate whether or not his purpose has been achieved based upon the information she receives from his listener. If the listener does not have an opportunity to provide the speaker with such feedback, then the exchange is not really communicative.

Examples of CommunicativeActivities

FeaturedCommunicative Activity:

The Role Play

1. Running Dictation

2. Find the liar

3. Predictions

4. The lying game

5. Pass the Bomb

Final Thoughts

THANKS!