María Acuña González
Portfolio-Journal entry 3
What does it imply nowadays to be a communicatively
competent L2 user?
Nowadays, interacting and participating with other L2 students can provide
remarkable help to improve the language and even learn more successfully.
There is a considerable difference between oral practice and real
communication. Most teachers nowadays tend to confuse these terms as they
teach.
One of the main mistakes that are usually made is that the teacher is completely
in control. There is no communication when students do not take part in the
activity, in fact they must make decisions for real communication to occur. The
activities may be more authentic, and these should not be focused on one
theme. Furthermore, by practicing real communication, students can answer a
question in different ways. Another essential aspect to make a class less guide
practiced is the focus on fluency, transmitting the message is one of the most
important points.
The ability to communicate requires four different sub-competencies:
grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic (Canale and Swain, 1980).
The ability to communicate requires four different sub-competencies:
grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic (Canale and Swain, 1980).
Besides, according to Levelt (1989) speaking as a communicative activity
requires four processes: conceptualization, utterance formulation, speech
articulation and self-monitoring.
Practicing communicative tasks in the classroom can have pros and cons.
Obviously it has many benefits such as the fluidity of the student and the
increasement of self-correction. But, nevertheless, it also has difficult aspects,
especially for beginning teachers. This is because students are sometimes
distracted (taking advantage of group work, for instance, to talk about personal
matters instead of the activity), they can also use L1 too much, cases of students
who prefer not to speak because they do not speak the new language well ... In
general, for a beginning teacher it is more difficult to carry out this type of
activities, but it is not impossible.
Lee.J (2000) states in Tasks and Communicating in Language Classrooms that a
task is a human activity that is goal directed, and this will require interaction
between people.
To find out the level of difficulty of a task, teachers should take into account the
following demands: linguistic complexity, communicative stress and cognitive
demands.
Furthermore, it is important to know that the way of how the task in is in
structure or designed influences the success of the class. Therefore, to design a
task, a series of steps must be followed: identify a desired informational
outcome, break down the topic into subtopics, create and sequence concrete
tasks for learners and build in linguistic support (Lee J, 2000). We can see the
case that the task is unsuccessful. This occurs when discussion questions in a
beginning class are made. If the students do not know about the topic, or
perhaps they do not have informed themselves, the goal of the class will not
occur, which is to have a conversation.
However, there are also tasks that end up being successful in a beginning class.
The trick is to make the students learn by participating together, making
homework a kind of game for them.
It should not be forgotten that the role of the teacher is very important when
implementing communicative tasks.
It is the teacher's duty to make these classes work, and for this he must follow a
series of guidelines. Some of the best steps to take were designed by Brandl. K.
(2009), which are: "make the goal clear from the beginning, involve all
participants equally, make sure students are adequately prepared, provide clear
instructions and examples, make an effort to mix groups, assign activities that
are relevant and interesting to students, circulate, circulate, circulate, teach
group interaction skill and hold group accountable for completing task on
time.”
For a beginning teacher it is a good thing to watch other teachers as they teach
their lessons. However, it may be the case that the tasks we observe do not
achieve our objective, which is to have real communication. But this can always
be improved, by creating groups, interaction between students and listen to
each other more frequently.
References
Brandl. K. 2009. Chapter 8 Developing oral communication skills. In Communicative
Language Teaching in Action. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson/Prentice Hall.
Canale, M. and Swain, M. 1980. Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to
second language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics 1 (1), 1-47.
Lee, J. 2000. Tasks and Communicating in Language Classrooms. New York: McGraw-
Hill.
Levelt, W. 1989. Speaking: From Intention to Articulation. Boston: MIT Press.
