Sociolinguistics and Language Education.pdf

294 Part 4: Language and Literacy
4. Strategic competence: This component of competence refers to additional
language learners’ capacity to achieve communication goals by
mastery of verbal and non-verbal communication strategies that may
be called into action for two main reasons: (a) to compensate for
breakdowns in communication due to limiting conditions in actual
communication (e.g. momentary inability to recall an idea or grammatical
form) or due to insuffi cient competence in one or more of the
other areas above; and (b) to enhance the effectiveness of communication
(e.g. deliberately slow and soft speech for rhetorical effect)
(Canale, 1983: 11).
Communicative competence, in this formulation, represented a considerable
expansion in the conceptual base of additional/second language
curriculum and pedagogy that existed up until that time. It would be fair
to say that the Canale and Swain framework became the bedrock of the
emerging Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach in the early
1980s, in which was adopted very quickly by the worldwide enterprise,
indeed industry, of English Language Teaching (ELT). CLT, as a curriculum
principle and as a teaching approach, has many manifestations in
teacher education handbooks and manuals, but its popularity among language
teachers, curriculum planners and textbook writers has not shown
any sign of decline in the past 25 years or so, as the following statement
from an English language teacher education textbook would demonstrate:
. . . in the early 1970s, a ‘sociolinguistic revolution’ took place, where
the emphasis given in linguistics to grammar was replaced by an
interest in ‘language in use’ . . . The sociolinguistic revolution had a
great effect on language teaching . . . [which led to] a type of syllabus
which aimed to cater for the teaching of language in use – of communicative
competence. ( Johnson, 2001: 182–183)
The attraction of the emerging CLT approach was initially founded on,
among other things, the principle that curriculum specifi cation should be
context- and participant-sensitive. That is to say, instead of generating
teaching content out of some aspect of the target language system, for
example grammatical structures, CLT would fi rst identify what and how
language is used in the pre-specifi ed domain of use before drawing up a
list of teaching content. This language identifi cation process is meant to be
carried out through a needs analysis (e.g. Brindley, 1989; Yalden, 1983).
However, as Dubin (1989) and Leung (2005) point out, this empirically
oriented approach to curriculum development has been more honoured
in the breach than observance. For example, Brown (2001: 43) offers a set
of characteristics of CLT which includes the following:
• paying attention to ‘the components (grammatical, discourse, functional,
sociolinguistic, and strategic) of communicative competence’;