Communicative approach.

Plan:

1. Communicative approach.

2. Communicative competence.

3. Communicative Aims.

Imagine yourself in the following situation: you sign up for a psychology experiment, and on a specified date you and seven others whom you think are also subjects arrive and are seated at a table in a small room. You don't know it at the time, but the others are actually associates of the experimenter, and their behaviour has been carefully scripted. You're the only real subject.

The experimenter arrives and tells you that the study in which you areabout to participate concerns people's visual judgments. She places two cards before you. The card on the left contains one vertical line. The card is on the right displays three lines of different length.

The experimenter asks all of you, one at a time, to choose which of the three lines on the right card matches the length of the line on the left card. The task is repeated several times with different cards. The other " subjects" unanimously choose the wrong line. It is clear to you that they are wrong, but they have all given the same answer.

What would you do? Would you go along with the majority opinion, or would you trust your own eyes?

In 1951, the social psychologist Asch used this experiment to exam­ine how the pressure from other people could affect one's perceptions. In total, about one third of the subjects who were placed in this situation agree with the majority.

Some of the subjects indicated after the experiment that they assumed the rest of the people were correct and that their own percep­tions were wrong. Others knew they were correct but didn't want to be different from the rest of the group. Some even insisted they saw tri line lengths as the majority did.

Asch concluded that it is difficult to maintain that you see something when no one else does. Pressure from other people can make you see al most anything.

The teacher should know exactly what his students are expected to achieve at the end of the course, at the end of the year, term, month & each particular lesson. He/she should know the aims & objectives of FLT. “Aim” is determined as a long-term goal; “objective” is used for a short-term goal.

The changes the teachers must bring up in students are treated as fourfold: practical- students acquire habits & skills in using a FL in communication; educational- they develop their mental abilities & intelligence in the process of learning the FL; cultural- students extend their knowledge of the world; cognitive- creating an individuum in the process of learning.

Communicative Aims: the teaching of FL should result in the student’s acquiring a second language for the same purpose as the native language: to use it as a means of communication on a competent level. Communicative competence comprises language & grammar knowledge, furthermore the use of language. Knowledge of language use is the knowledge of how to use language appropriately-how to get it to do in the right circumstances. A distinguish has to be drawn between what we know how the language is used to construct sentences. The linguist Noam Chomsky called these concepts competence (knowledge) & performance (the realization of this knowledge as sentences). Language competence is subconscious by nature & it allows native speakers to generate grammatically correct sentences. He claimed that linguistics should study a native speaker's unconscious knowledge of his or her own language (competence), not the speaker's actual production of language (performance).Because Chomsky thought that a description of the rules that make up a native speaker's competence could account for an infinite number of examples of performance, he wanted to write a grammar that would identify those unconscious rules. Unlike the structuralists, then, who collected samples of language produced by native speakers and then classified them, Chomsky developed transformational grammar, a set of rules that could generate structural descriptions for all the grammatical sentences of a language, and he tested results against actual language samples. (Transformational grammar has been continually evolving since Chomsky first introduced it in Syntactic Structures in 1957.)

Competent speakers know the Lexis (vocabulary) of a language. This knowledge varies depending on their education & occupation. They know what words mean & they also know the subtleties of some of those meanings. They do not get confused to use “heart” in the sentence “He wears his heart on his sleeve.”

Competent speakers know the connotations of a word: f.e. choose “thin”, “slim”, “skinny” or “emaciated” for your best friend.

Competent speakers know how to change words: possible-impossible, interesting-interested Competent speakers know what words mean literally & metaphorically: f.e. “awesome” used to mean something that filled people with a mixture of respect & fear. Now it means simply “good” or “great”

Learners should distinguish formal & informal, literal & colloquial, oral & written styles.

2 ways of language use: directly (orally) & indirectly (in written form). We distinguish oral language & written language. Direct communication implies a speaker & a listener, indirect-a writer & a reader. Hence the communicative aims in teaching a FL are 4 in number: listening, speaking, reading and writing.

Factors should be considered before setting the aims: the economic & political conditions of the society, the requirements of the state, the general goals of secondary school education, the nature of the subject.

Control questions:

1. What’s communicative approach?

2. What’s communicative competence?

3. What communicative aims do you know?

Recommended literature:

1. Педагогическая психология. И.А.Зимняя, М., 1997

2. Психологические основы формирования личности в педагогическом коллективе. А.Коссаковски, М., 1961

3. Психологический справочник учителя. Л.М.Фридман, 1991