English Learning for Communicative Competence

Abstract

According to the report on the achievement and tasks of English education policy focused on practical English which was released by the Korea Institute of Curriculum and Evaluation(KICE), more than 90 percent of elementary school students and their parents, 86 percent of middle school students and their parents, and 76 percent of high school students and their parents hope for a balanced education of four skills -reading, listening, speaking and writing-to enhance students’ communicative competence. In response to this desire, KICE made the National English Ability Test (NEAT) which includes speaking and writing, as well as reading and listening and which will replace the current Korea SAT in a few years. This test consists of three levels. The test of level 3 requires students’ practical English knowledge in listening, speaking and writing part and only the reading part requires 30% of subject knowledge. To help the target students acquire the abilities which are required to take this test in the future, this text book will provide a chance to improve their four skills and to build vocabulary knowledge which is related to both practical and academic area. This text book is designed for Korean first year public high school students. Most students have never been abroad and they have very limited knowledge about the target culture. In the light of the casual observationsI had made during my teaching in public high school, the average level of students is Intermediate Mid to Intermediate High according to the ACTFL (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages).From my experience of teaching high school students, first graders in high school are curious about foreign culture. At the same time, they want to build their grammar and vocabulary knowledge which will help them improve their four skills. Also, even though the government-initiated English education policies in Korea had adopted Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) to enhance students’ communicative competence, classes still fail to teach communicative approaches. (Howard& Millar. 2008, p.71).Therefore, students need the opportunity to improve their communicative skills by producing and receiving the target language as well as building vocabulary knowledge. The target class is an extracurricular class in a public middle school that meets three times a week for 60 minutes after school. 2. Method This text book will incorporate the CLT and Task Based Language Teaching approaches. First, CLT has specific aims to enable students to build communicative competence and to develop the four skills to communicate (Richards & Rodgers, 2007, p. 155). Also, it focuses on using language in meaningful context. (Savignon& Wang, 2003).These features of CLT also meet target students’ learning needs for getting a good score on the NEAT. In addition, CLT gives students plentiful exposure to language in use and involves them in realistic communication. With this textbook, students will encounter various topics related to real life and have the chance to communicate with others in meaningful context. Second, I will use Task-Based Language Teaching. It will provide the communicative tasks which lead learners to understand, produce, and interact in the target language, focusing primarily on meaning (Nunan, 1989, p.10). In addition, language points will be presented before the task following Nunan’s task-based cycle which includes schema building, controlled practice, authentic listening, focusing on linguistic elements, freer practice, and pedagogical task because the target students’ proficiency level is not high(Nunan, 2004, pp.35-38). At some stages, students will talk about the environmental issues by listening to news stories about global warming before doing the main reading. Depending on tasks and topics, however, some components of Willis’ task cycle will be adopted (Willis& Willis.2007). To accomplish the pedagogical tasks, students will engage in cooperative learning (CL). According to McGroarty(1989), CL gives students opportunities to practice language, to improve their language skills, as well as to be more active learners. Through group or pair work, target students will negotiate meaning, feel less anxiety, and learn from each other. Moreover, to help students to complete the task, “Grammar Part”, which provides structural information about the language form, will be presented using an inductive approach. However, for some difficult language points, deductive approach will be used since students’ levels are not advanced. This textbook will consist of authentic materials such as news articles, advertisements,and transcriptions of real-worlddialogues. 3. Expected Outcomes By usingthis textbook, students will be able to complete given tasks while developing both receptive and productive skills. Additionally, students will be able to acknowledge grammatical language points and vocabulary knowledge related to daily life and academic area andto improve social skillsthrough cooperative learning. Finally, students will be able to improve their communicative competence. 4. Conclusion Due to the future changes in the national test system, target students are required to acquire the four language skills and daily life knowledge about the target culture. To help them, this text book will provide language input related to daily life topics and academic contents. In addition, communicative tasks which give students many chances to produce the language in cooperative contexts will enhanceboth their productive and receptive skills.