Effective Communicative Competence Teaching Strategies

The Notion of Communicative Competence

Before underlining the main instructional methods used for the acquisition and learning of a second language, it is necessary to tackle the main concept our legal framework refers to: communicative competence. Let us analyze it first.

Defining Communication and Competence

The idea of communicative competence is the result of a convergence between Chomsky's conceptions and sociolinguistic investigations into communication situations. Dell Hymes (1972) defines it as: "the shared knowledge of grammar rules and their rules of use." Widdowson notes that usage and use are not one and the same.

M. Canale and M. Swain (1980) mention a triple competence: grammatical, sociolinguistic, and strategic. D. Coste (1978) proposes differentiating between linguistic, textual, referential, and situational components. Sophie Moirand (1982) highlights four subcomponents: linguistic, discursive, referential, and sociocultural.

To achieve communicative competence, the following five subcompetences combined are necessary:

• Linguistic
• Sociolinguistic
• Discursive
• Referential
• Strategic

Instructional Methods and Techniques

It is difficult to state which methods or approaches reflect better responses to questions about how students achieve communicative competence. However, several key techniques include:

• Brainstorming: A technique for producing the greatest possible number of ideas around a question or a topic.
• Cooperative Learning: A way of organizing student interaction to encourage students to work together in small groups, rather than individually or in competition with each other.
• The Cloze Procedure: A specific method or technique that encourages students to use all kinds of strategies to construct meaning, especially when reading. In it, words are removed from a sentence or a short text, and students must use their background knowledge.
• Grammatical Problem-Solving: Involves having students use deductive reasoning to discover rules and understand grammatical concepts on their own.
• Graphic Organizers: Visual representations of texts or groups of related ideas, words, or thoughts.