Title: Communicative Competence and Language Learning Styles of Prospective Teachers of English
Abstract: ABSTRACTThis paper is aimed at exploring the possible relationshipbetween the level of competence and language learning styles of prospective teachers of English. Results of the study on over all competence show test show that the prospective teachers of English are fairly competent users of English with a total mean of 23.97 with standard deviation of 5.44. In terms of their language learning styles, results of the study also show that their style of orientation belonged to sensory orientation scale with a frequency of 39 or 69%. Correlation analysis, however, shows the insignificant relationship between the level of competence and language learning styles of prospective teachers of English. This indicates that the language learning style has no bearing on the level of competence of prospective teachers of English. Therefore, it is recommended that experiences in actual school environments for prospective teachers of English should also be enhanced in addition to a series of courses that will develop language learning style and competence of prospective teachers of English.Keywords: Communicative language learning style, prospective teachers of English, language performance.INTRODUCTION:One of the most popular words in the 20th century is communication. This has a great influence in the language teaching world not only because of its high frequency appearance in the research world but also because of its essential meaning that represents the gradual globalization in the past century. Since Hymes, a linguistic anthropologist proposed the concept of communicative competence, Chomsky's scope of linguistic theory confronted an attack of breaking Chomskyian's idealism. For Chomsky, he focuses his attention on the rules of language for a generative grammar.However, for Dell Hymes, his concern is not only on grammaticalpossibilities in a language, but on feasibility and appropriateness as well (Spolsky, 1989; Grenfell & Harris 1999 cited in Xin 2007). In like manner, once the competence approach embarks on the academic and pedagogic world, many linguists enrich the contents and features of competence. After Hymes (1972), Canale and Swain (1980) and Bachman (1990) are the representatives who have developed and extended the notion of which attempts to include all these dimensions: the grammatical, the social and psychological (Xin, 2007). However, these are not just some developments in linguistic theory, but an impetus to establishing a concept of language learning and teaching.Canale and Swain (1980) proposed their own theory of competence that minimally includes four main competencies: grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic competence. Grammatical competence includes knowledge of lexical items and rules of morphology, syntax, sentence, grammar semantics and phonology. They pointed out that grammatical competence would be animportant concern for any approach whose goals include providing learners with knowledge of how to determine and express accurately the literal meaning of utterances. Sociolinguistic competence is made up of two sets of rules: sociolinguistic rules of use and rules ofdiscourse.Discourse competence refers to the interpretation of individual message elements in terms of their interconnectedness and of how meaning is represented in relationship to the entire discourse or text. Further, they believe that knowledge of these rules would be crucial in interpreting utterances for social meaning, particularly when there is a level of transparency between the literal meaning of an utterance and the speaker's intention. Finally, strategic competence is made up of verbal and non-verbal communication strategies that may be called into action to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to performance variables or to insufficient grammatical competence as to how to help students acquire competence in theclassroom. …
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 4
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