Summary (Google Scholar)

In the article "Communicative Competence" Sandra J. Savignon comments on the topic of different methods of teaching second foreign language and the process of their development. She claims that communicative experience must be integrated into classes and teachers have to be proficient enough to organize and to guide this process. First, Sandra J. Savignon focuses on the methods of teaching which linguists developed in the 1940s. One of them was based on drilling grammatical structures, the other one appeared with the beginning of World War II and corresponding need in interpreters. But soon both these approaches were replaced by more intensive one which was called audio-lingual method. The author underlines that at that time this method was quite effective as far technologies were being developed and recording appeared. However, this approach was put into a question by a young linguist Noam Chomsky and a sociolinguist Hymes who introduced the term communicative competence and claimed that drilling grammatical structures and listening to the records is not enough. They stated that learners need to have social context, so communication is necessary in the process of teaching. The communicative language method appeared. But as far a lot of teachers were taught with the help of previous methods they transferred them onto their own students, so Sandra J. Savignon sees the problem in it, because it slowed down the integration of dialogues and communicative experience. Finally, the author states that the teacher is supposed to be very experienced and flexible so to make it possible to create the necessary atmosphere and the rhythm of the studying process.
I've chosen this article because it is really interesting for me to learn how to teach foreign languages, and also the topic is related to what we study on a special course, so it was useful to clarify and complete the information I'd had.
While reading the article I got a couple of questions: 
  1. What is the ideal balance among drilling grammatical structures, writing, listening and communicative interaction?
  2. How does language define the community?

Комментарии

  1. Natalia Eydelman7 ноября 2018 г. в 15:44

    Hello Vlada,

    Thanks for sharing this article's summary and explaining its main points. I found it really well written both from the point of view of its content and how clearly the ideas are communicated. Both questions you have come up with are very interesting. Are you interested in investigating one of them further? If yes, I'm inviting you to do it.

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