The Measurement of Communicative Competence

1987 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 67-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Canale

In 1978 Merrill Swain and I had the opportunity to review theory and practice in the emerging communicative orientaitons to second language teaching and testing. The immediate outcomes of that review were published by the Ontario Ministry of Education in the form of a theoretical position paper (Canale and Swain 1979; see also Canale and Swain 1980) and a bank of sample items and techniques for measuring communication skills in French as a second language (Ontario Ministry of Education 1980). Although the limitations and problems in various communicative approaches have become increasingly evident since 1978, communicative competence has nonetheless become one of the most productive, influential, and complex paradigms in applied linguistics. Nowhere is this more true than in the relatively isolated area of measurement of communicative competence. It is thus appropriate to review activity in this area over the past decade.

1992 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 144-151
Author(s):  
Susan Bennett

Through this position paper the author seeks to provide a focus for extended discussion of some of the key issues arising from feminist approaches to theatre research. She indicates some of the insights made possible by feminist theoretical analyses of theatre historiography as well as some of the implications of the various positions inscribed in articles on Canadian feminist theatre historiography over the past ten years. The author hopes to facilitate more discussion of the wide variety of feminist challenges to and transformation of the theory and practice of theatre research and theatre historiography.


1989 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. vii-xi
Author(s):  
Robert B. Kaplan

This tenth volume of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (ARAL) concerns itself with a survey of applied linguistics broadly, as this series did in volume I and volume V. The changes which have occurred in the field generally over the past decade are impressive; indeed, a volume such as this one would have been quite impossible ten years ago. Some of the topics covered in this volume are ones to which this series has repeatedly returned—e.g., language planning, language-in-education planning, bilingualism; others are unique to this volume—e.g., language and aging, and still others represent sub-fields which have been treated previously but which have expanded significantly in the years since volume I was published—e.g., second-language acquisition, language testing.


Author(s):  
OLGA PETRYSHYNA

Developing communicative competence of future teachers majoring in non-linguistic specialities is a priority of the progressive educational paradigm. Nowadays in linguodidactics the perfect mastery of professional communicative skills, the skill of text creation in different discourse conditions is especially relevant. Taking into account the linguistic and didactic characteristics of higher education seekers is the basis for the development of public communication skills that correlate with the requirements of the time, the needs of society, the tasks of modern education. Substantiation of the phenomenon of “public communication” in terms of linguistic didactics is important for the development of guidelines, concepts and models for teaching the theory and practice of public communication, for the selection of effective methods and techniques. Speech is a necessary basis for thinking. Public communication especially foregrounds significant mental-speech operations: analysis, synthesis, abstraction, concretization, reproduction of material, text creation. The method of developing public communication skills focuses on solving problems related to the perception of educational material, awareness of the essence of rhetorical concepts, text creation. Effectiveness is ensured by synergy with psychological research on the patterns of mental operations that underlie the perception, memorization and reproduction of prepared material. Approaches to the development of public communication skills are largely based on well-known ancient theories, including those based on folk speech culture. The analysis of the basic concepts of classical rhetoric and practice of public communication (logos, ethos, pathos and topos) require innovative methodological and methodical elaboration and directing at the communicative competence of the contemporary teacher majoring in non-linguistic specialities. The character of the linguistic personality is determined by typical communicative national features, existing in the form of thought forms / formulas, concepts, value lexical and semantic dominants. The university should ideally mould a speaker ready for different types of public communication, to create a discourse in any time and space, who knows language norms and communicative qualities of oral and written speech as indicators of speech culture, text technology, speech etiquette. Age features, openness to the perception of information, self-expression in competitive speech situations, ambition, search for authority, the desire to overcome negative stereotypes in the perception of the teaching profession are the very linguistic and didactic aspects that should be relied on while working on communicative competence. We see the prospect of further research in the development of a system of work on the development of the idiosyncrasy of public communication which underlies the formation of a personal brand of the teacher.


1987 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 3-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Brumfit

Some linguists may well feel that it is inappropriate to devote an entire issue of the Annual Review of Applied Linguistics to a movement exclusively within language teaching. It would certainly be inaccurate to see language teaching as simply an application of linguistics, and some parts of this issue of ARAL will necessarily survey material that is not exclusively applied linguistics. Nonetheless, one particular tradition of applied linguistics has been heavily committed to the development of effective second language teaching strategies, and communicative language teaching has been responsive to changes in our approach to language study in its most central tenets and beliefs.


1980 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 26-42
Author(s):  
F. Gomes de Matos

The design of teaching materials for second or foreign language teaching (hereafter SFLT) should be a particularly creative and insightful activity for applied linguists to engage in, yet a search through the ever-growing literature of Applied Linguistics reveals that relatively negligible attention has been given to the study of applications of linguistics to SFLT textbooks (Gomes de Matos 1976a). A look at the Proceedings (1971, 1974, 1976) of three Congresses of the International Association of Applied Linguistics (AILA) shows that in its Stuttgart, 1975 Congress, AILA features a section devoted to Language Materail Development, but the program of its 1978 Montreal meeting reveals that the former sectin was subsumed under the section Second Language Teaching and Learning. Greater recognition of the importance of textbooks in Applied Linguistics can be seen in the inclusion in AILA's 1981 Congress in Lund, Sweden of a section on Teaching Materials, Textbooks (note the explicit mention of the latter), and Pedagogical Grammars.


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