2.1 Communicative functions of language.
“The ultimate goal of language teaching is to enable the students to use the foreign language in work or life when necessary.”1 The purpose of learning a language is to communicate with others. It is to say the main function of a language is to communicate. So we should always put this function in the important position. And in our teaching we should let our students know how to use the language to express their own feelings and to understand others. That’s important.
“One possible solution to bridge the gap between classroom language teaching and real life language use is the adoption of communicative language teaching, which has in recent years become a fashionable term to cover a variety of developments in syllabus design and in the methodology of foreign language teaching.”2 The goal of teaching is to develop students’ communicative competence, which includes both the knowledge about the language and the knowledge about how to use the language appropriately in communicative situations.
“Communicative competence includes four aspects:
1) Knowing whether or not something is formally possible (grammatically acceptable)
2) Knowing whether something is understandable to human beings
3) Knowing whether something is in tine with social norms
4) Knowing whether or not something is in fact done: Do people actually use language this way?”3
In other words, communicative competence entails knowing not only the language code or the form of language, but also what to say to whom and how to say it appropriately in any given situation. Communication competence includes knowledge of what to say, when, how, where, and to whom.
2.2 “Setting the Scene”4
Make a real or similar situation for the students to help them to understand. We can use body language、pictures、real objects and so on.
For example, listening to passages in the classroom can be more difficult than listening in real life, because of the lack of context. So the teacher can help provide the background information to activate learners’ schema, so they will be better prepared to understand what they hear.
Also, while teaching new words, new phrases, new sentences or new texts, we can set the scene for them, so they can easy to understand and remember.
Example:
When I teach the new words: tomato, new sentences: How much is /are……, please? And that’s cheap/expensive.
Before the class I prepare some objects like tomatoes, apples, some bags of milk and so on. And I ask my students to take something, too.
In the class, I first take out an apple, then ask:
T: What’ this?
S: It’s an apple.
Then I show them the tomato.
T: What is this? Do you know?
S: Sorry, I don’t know. / I think it’s a tomato.
T: Good! It is a tomato.
Then I take out two or more tomatoes.
T: How many tomatoes do I have? (Write down tomatoes on the blackboard and Red “es”)
S: Two.
T: Good. Please don’t forget “es” when you use plural number.