Communicative Competence In Communicative Language Learning

Introduction

Interest in and use of authentic material has been a focus of discussion and debate with the English language teachers. The advocacy for authentic material has been long. Many language teachersfavored the use of authentic material and discussed their benefits. They believed that authentic materials are ‘natural texts’ which do ‘justice to every feature of the language’(cited in Gilmore, 2004). After the Communicative Language teaching approach, one important aspect was discussed that communicative competence in English language does not mean to have knowledge of the language but the need for contextualized communication. This view is taken seriously by teachers of Communicative Language Teaching which has been widely used for

Roger (1988) defines it as ‘appropriate’ in terms of its objectives, goals, learner needs and interest and calls it ‘natural’ in terms of its real- life and meaningful communication. Harmer (1991) calls them as ‘real texts’, designed not for language teaching purpose. Many language teachers (Shrum and Glisan, 2000; Richards, 2001; Kilickaya, 2004, etc.) believe that authenticity has proved its beneficial role in language teaching.Kilickaya said, ‘ ..for using authentic material simply means using examples of language produced by native speakers for some real purpose of their own rather than using language produced and designed solely for classroom’. For Indian speakers learning to communicate in English from the materials drawn from England or America will not be of much use as the learners might not have the information where the language is used. If they lack situational reference, the students of this foreign language will be demotivated and cannot use them in their context.They need to be exposed to the materials that they relate to, which they have information about and which is part of their reality. What is common in these definitions of authentic material is ‘exposure to real language’ to be used in

It has been a debate for many years as to whether authentic materials can be used for the lower level learners. While some language teachers are of the opinion that they can be used for intermediate and graduate level students, others feel that primary and secondary level of students can also get exposed to authentic material. They feel that it might not expose the students to comprehensible input at the earliest stage of language acquisition. Authentic material might also contain difficult vocabulary items and complex language structures which might demotivate the learners specially lower level students. It is also time consuming for the teachers to collect, select and sort the materials for the course objectives. Materials might get out dated soon. Authentic materials sometimes might have culturally biased texts(Guariento and Morley, 2001, Martinez, 2002, Kim,