2。3。3 Canale & Swain’s communicative competence theory

In 1980, Canadian scholars M。 Canale and M。 Swain further enriched Hymes’ theory of communicative competence, and pided it into four components, consisting of grammatical competence, discourse competence, sociocultural competence and strategic competence。 (Celce-Murcia 16)文献综述

Grammatical competence refers to sentence-level grammatical forms, the ability to recognize the lexical, morphological, syntactic, and phonological feature of a language and to make use of these features to interpret and form words and sentences。 Discourse competence is concerned not with isolated words or phrases but with the interconnectedness of a series of utterances, written words, and/or phrases to form a text, a meaningful whole。 Sociocultural competence extends well beyond linguistic forms and is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry having to do with the social rules of language use。 Strategic competence is the strategy we use in unfamiliar contexts, with constraints due to imperfect knowledge of rules or limiting factors in their application such as fatigue or distraction。 (Celce-Murcia 17&18)

2。3。4 Nunan’s characteristics of CLT and Savignon’s five components of communicative curriculum

The most obvious feature of CLT is that almost everything that is done with a communicative intent。 As a facilitator of students’ learning, the teacher needs to organize various activities for students to use the language in a communicative way, and takes advantage of all situations to let communications occur naturally。 David Nunan offers five points to characterize the Communicative Approach (Cao 457):

 An emphasis on learning to communicate through interaction in the target language; 

 The introduction of authentic texts into the learning situation;

 The provision of opportunities for learners to focus, not only on language but also on the learning process itself;

 An enhancement of the learner’s own personal experiences as important contributing elements to classroom learning;

 An attempt to link classroom language learning with language activation outside the classroom。

As Savignon points out, the classroom model shows the hypothetical integration of four components that have been advanced as composing communicative competence。 From Savignon’s “inverted pyramid” classroom model (Figure 2。3。4), we can figure out that an increase in one component interacts with other components to produce a corresponding increase in overall communicative competence。 (Celce-Murcia 17)