engleski

Communicative Competence of Young EFL Beginners

The paper discusses communicative competence as the goal of communicative language taching. Three main components of communicative competence are described, i.e. grammatical, sociolinguistic and strategic competence, and the emphasis is placed on strategic competence, which refers to the use of different communication strategies. A typology of communication strategies is given and their role in foreig language learning is discussed. The paper also describes a study which was conducted among primary school learners, aged 11 to 12, in order to evaluate their communicative performance in English and Croatian, their mother tongue. Examples of the communication strategies they used were provided and the hypothesis that they would use more or less the same communication strategies in their native language and in the foreign language, proved to be correct. Focusing on communicative needs and processes of learners, the paper suggests some important characteristics of communicative language teaching.

young learners; EFL; communicative competence

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