Annotated Bibliography 1

Annotated Bibliography 1
Canale, Michael and Merril Swain. (1979). Theoretical Bases of Communicative Approaches to Second Language Teaching and Testing. Applied Linguistics, 1 (1), 1-47.

This article is the proposal of a theoretical framework for communicative competence and its implications for second language teaching and testing. The authors base on their proposal on various theories of communicative competence that have been proposed by former linguists.

Chomsky (1965) introduced the concepts of competence and performance (p.3). A few years later many applied linguists broadened his concepts. Van Ek (1976) says that students can develop their communicative competence at early stages with the basic communication skills. These skills help them to survive (linguistically speaking) in temporary contacts with foreign language speaker in everyday situations (p.9). While Halliday (1973) and Hymes (1972) who bring the sociolinguistic perspectives into Chomsky’s linguistic view of competence claim that communicative competence is concerned with the interaction of social context, grammar, and social meaning (p.19). According to Widdowson, communicative abilities have to be developed at the same time as the linguistic skills; otherwise the mere acquisition of the linguistic skills may inhibit the development of communicative abilities. He distinguishes two aspects of performance : “usage” (learner’s knowledge of linguistic rules) and “use” (learner’s ability to use his linguistic rules for effective communication).
Canale and Swain, then, study that those theorists have a little attention to communication strategies, the establishment of grammatical and semantic concepts, and the evaluation and levels of achievement (p.25). They propose their own theory of communicative competence that minimally includes three main competencies: grammatical, sociolinguistic and strategic competence. Grammatical competence includes knowledge of lexical items and of rules of morphology, syntax, and semantics. This competence is important for providing learners with knowledge of how to determine and express accurately the literal meaning of utterances. Sociolinguistics competence is made up of two sets of rules of use and rules of discourse. This competence is important in interpreting utterances for social meaning. Strategic competence is made up of verbal and non-verbal communication strategies that may be used to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to performance variables or to insufficient grammatical competence.

This article is considered hard to read but very beneficial to widen the reader’s knowledge on the background theories of communicative approach development in language teaching and testing. According to this approach the objective of foreign language teaching and testing is to help learners to develop their communicative competence. Therefore, the reader now understands that syllabus design, teaching methodology, teacher training, and material development should be planned on the basis of communicative functions.