Summary of the Article Communicative competence and communicative language teaching. By: Atsuko Ohno

This article explains how communication, communicative competency and communicative language teaching contribute to improve the English language teaching in the education system. The author, Atsuko Ohno attempts to clear up confusion among the area of communicative competence, by discussing several theoretical communicataive concepts and their applicatiions to language and methods of teaching language. First, he presents Hymes' work of communicative competence. Second he explains Widdowon's work regarding communicative language teaching. Third, he discusses Canale and Swain's work of communicative competence. Finally in his fourth section he explains the application of commmunicative competence to language teaching, using Stern and Rivers' framework.

Hymes' concept of communicative competence come from Chomsky's distinction between competence and performance. By competence, Chomsky means that the shared knowledge of the ideal speaker - listener set in a completely homogeneous speech community. Performance is concerned with the process of applying the knowledge to the actual language use; encoding and encoding. He also points out Labov's work, that linguistic competence co-varies with the speaker. Futhermore, he states that social life affects not only performance but inner competence itself. He argues that social factors interfere with or restrict grammar use because the rules of use are dominant over the rules of grammar. He insists that the rules of speech are controlling factors for the linguistic form as a whole. He defines communicative competence as a knowledge of the rules for understanding and producing both the referential and social meaning of language.

He continues with some "integrative theories" from Widdowson, which according to him, the idea that once competence is acquired, performance will take care of itself is false. Communicative abilities have to be developed as the same time as linguistic skills. He distinguishes the terms "usage" and "use" to make the discussion of teaching linguistic and communicative competence clear. He states that "usage"makes evident the extent to which the language user demonstrates his knowledge of linguistic rules. The term "use" make evident the extent to which the language user shows his ability to use his knowledge of linguistic rule for effective communication. He also distinguishes two aspects of meaning."significance" and "value". "Significance is the meaning that sentences have in isolation from the particular situation in which the sentence is produced; and "value refers to the meaning that the sentence take on when they are used to communicate. He believes that linguistic context and communicative context must be used in class.

Canale and Swain (1980) believe that the study of grammatical comptence is as essential to the study of communcative competence as is the study of social linguistic competence. Their work focuses on the interacion of social context, grammar and meaning.

Stern (1981) and Rivera (1972) offer two levels of language teaching: "skill-getting" and "skill - using" Through "skill-getting" activities, the teacher isolates specific elements of knowledge and provides the learner with opportunities to practice them separately. With " skills-using", the learner should be on her own and not supported or directed by teacher.

All of these theories are important in teaching foreign language. Foreign language teachers are always affected since approaches to language learning using these theories place a high demand on teachers. Student-teacher relationship are among the most essential ingredients for successful communicative language teaching.