published_or_final_version / Psychology / Master / Master of Philosophy

A thesis Submitted as a requirement for the degree of doctor of Philosophy (D.Phil) in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts at University of Zululand, 2008. / This study investigates communicative competence in English among rural African high school learners in the Eshowe circuit. Poor student performance especially in higher institutions has generally been linked to incompetence in English Second Language, which motivated an investigation into communicative competence among high school learners from a rural background. The study was conducted in five high schools in the Eshowe circuit The design of the study necessitated the adoption of qualitative approach in order to probe the multifaceted phenomenon of communicative approach in its natural setting (the classroom situation). The theoretical underpinnings on which this study relied on were extracted from the field of discourse analysis and text linguistics. Also, due to the nature of the study i.e. being concerned with communicative competence and Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), much of the literature reviewed surveyed the concept of communicative competence from scholars and researchers such as Chomsky (1969); Hymes (1982); Widdowson (1985), and Saville-Troike (1997). Moreover, the linguistic context on which the study was based necessitated that we explore the definitions of bilingualism and multilingualism. Classroom discourse was used in analysing the lessons in a Second Language classroom setting. Lessons seemed to display a unique classroom interaction pattern, typical of teacher-pupil interaction in a Second Language classroom. In addition, the study looked at the extent to which the lessons complied with the expectations of the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) with particular attention to \earner roles and teacher roles in CLT. Moreover, the analysis of lessons is subjected to seven standards of textuality discussed by Beaugrande and Dressier (1981), which helped determine the textuality of lesson texts, as these standards are activated during communicative events. The study further considered possible remedy to the errors found in English lesson transcripts. Though the National Curriculum Statement offered viable solutions to learners' errors, a challenge lied with errors committed by teachers, who according to the study, fell below the assumed competence and fell short of being subject specialists. Nevertheless, teachers' utterances were characterised by occurrences of code-switching, which according to the study played a positive role in regulating classroom behaviour. From the analysis of lessons it emerged that in most lessons, though a communicative approach was followed, there was little or no linguistic input from the teachers, which raised doubts about the implementation of the communicative approach to language teaching. Indeed, data indicated shortfalls in the implementation of CLT as expected in NCS. The problem of communicative incompetence loomed heavily not only over the learners, but also over the teachers as well, which is a cause for concern in the teaching of English as a Second Language.

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Abstract Acquiring communicative competence and the ability to communicate in writing are essential goals for second language learners and of the highest importance to achieving educational success.  Opportunities to express ideas in writing are essential for students’ language development. Learners therefore need to be encouraged to take the risk of making errors in order to be able to express ideas, thoughts and knowledge with enthusiasm. This thesis defines and investigates some important factors contributing to the development of communicative competence and performance in the context of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research and Communicative Language Teaching (CLT).  The main aim of the study is to focus on how Swedish learners make use of their first language (L1) as a cognitive and strategic source in their written English communication.  Cross-linguistic influence, or transfer errors, from Swedish in the written English of high school students are taken from samples of writing from the Uppsala Learner English Corpus (ULEC).  The study evaluates the potential of transfer from the L1 to either facilitate or inhibit the communicative purpose, i.e., ‘getting the message across’. The most serious errors in the data were found to result in confusing, inappropriate or incomprehensible structures.  Finally, the study draws attention to some aspects of communicative language teaching and learning that teachers should be aware of in the development and assessment of students’ communicative ability in written performance. The study found that negative language transfer was found to affect communication to various degrees of seriousness but could at times also be considered a useful and necessary strategy for getting a message across.  Transfer errors were often idiosyncratic and were most frequent among males between 16-17 years-old enrolled in vocational programmes.  Prepositional transfer errors were the most common, however; incorrectly used lexical items, in particular, false friends and other vocabulary substitutions, as well as literal translations of phrases and idiomatic expressions potentially resulted in the most serious errors.  Word order errors also interfered substantially with the message in many cases.  On the other hand, grammatical transfer errors such as incorrect us of articles, pluralisation and verb tense generally did not change the meaning to any greater extent.  In fact, transfer errors can be communicative as long as the message gets across.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2009. / "Graduate Program in Education." Includes bibliographical references (p. 206-213).

published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

The final project “Training of Communicative Competence of Management Students in Lithuanian Colleges” by the graduate of Master’s broad education programme of Vilnius Pedagogical University, pedagogic and psychology department Rima Bačiulytė, analyses the situation of training communicative competence of management career education in higher non-university educational institutions. Seeing that every person’s communicative competence forms presumptions for his/her worth personal life, and the effective usage of communicative abilities determines the development of an organization in substantial social, economical and technical transformation conditions, and one of the aims of colleges is to fulfill social-economical needs of appropriate regions and the country, so great attention should be paid to training of communicative competence in colleges. The terms of communication, competence, and communicative competence are defined, scientists’ opinions to required knowledge, abilities and skills, values and motivation are summarised, a manager’s communicative competence in modern transformation conditions is analysed, the basis of effective communication – match of speaking, listening, writing and reading is shown, the role of college in training of communicative competence of a manager is evaluated in the project. The expression of this competence in curricula and the documents regulating them are analysed, the results of the survey of students’ opinions are presented. As... [to full text]

The communicative competence of bilingual children involves a large array of skills---they must not only acquire the full range of communication skills of monolinguals but also learn when, how and with whom to use each language. This dissertation features three studies on the communication skills of bilingual children (French-English bilinguals aged 2.5 and 3 years from the Montreal area). Studies 1 and 2 explored these children's ability to make appropriate language choices by studying their responsiveness to two types of cues: The first study investigated whether children's language choice is influenced by their interlocutor's code-mixing; the second study examined whether children change their language in response to their interlocutor's requests for clarification following the children's use of the inappropriate language. The children demonstrated that they were capable of making on-line adjustments in their language choice in response to both types of cues, thereby showing that sensitivity to cues for language change is part of bilingual children's communicative competence from a young age. Study 3 compared bilingual and monolingual children's responses to requests for clarification following breakdowns in communication due to problematic aspects of their utterances such as speaking too softly or mispronouncing words. The findings revealed no significant differences between the bilingual and monolingual children's responses and suggest that the acquisition of conversational repair skills is not influenced by the simultaneous acquisition of two languages. Together, these three studies contribute to the understanding of the skills underlying children's ability to make appropriate language choices and suggest that the unique demands of bilingual interpersonal communication do not interfere with the acquisition of more general communication skills.

Research in the area of sex and gender communication has been largely relegated the organizational setting and the superior/subordinate framework. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the effects of biological sex and psychological gender on evaluations of communication appropriateness within the interpersonal context. College students were first asked to complete a sex-role inventory. There were then presented with a series of scenarios depicting a communication encounter in which communicators adhered to gendered communication behavior norms, and a communication encounter in which communicators deviated from gendered communication behavior norms. After reading each transcript, participants completed a communication appropriateness scale for each character presented in the scenarios. The results show that within the interpersonal context, there are differences between males and females in evaluations of general competence, and that males enacting a feminine style of communication are evaluated as more communicatively appropriate than males enacting a masculine style of communication. Finally, this study provides a critique on the Bem Sex-Role Inventory based upon empirical evidence. / Department of Communication Studies