Computer-Assisted Language Learning and the Improvement of Communicative Competence

Abstract

Communicative competence which covers all aspects of language use has always been the goals to reach both for the language teachers and undergraduates in their English language teaching and learning. As English is the foreign language with no or little language environment for students to pick up the language outside the educational institutions, information technology and computer network which have been widely used in higher education provide vivid English with the virtual environment of the video and audio resources. The practice of using information technology to teach English has been widely adopted in the English language classroom. The paper aims at discussing on the development of students' communicative competence supported by the computer-assisted language learning (CALL). Keywords-CALL; communicative competence; information technology. I. INTRODUCTION Communicative competence which covers all aspects of language use has always been the goals for the learners to reach in the curriculum of higher education. As English is a foreign language that can only be learnt in the educational institutions in China, most of the students have no or little opportunities to pick up the English language when they go out of the English classrooms. With the introduction of computer and information technology to the foreign language education, colleges and universities of higher education in China have set up multimedia and digital language laboratories with the support of government finance. The modernized digital language laboratories enable the college students to immerse in the virtual language environment which is built by the computer and network with the rich resources of native English. By viewing, listening and watching the online learning resources of English language, students may immerse in the English language environment with the native speakers' English and obtain enormous input that enables learners to be ready to speak fluently. However, every coin has two sides. On the one hand, the new technology provides the foreign language learners with the authentic English from speakers of English speaking countries, and the students may benefit from the real-life English that is good for their language use and future-career development; on the other hand, the new mode of teaching which is quite different from the traditional classrooms teaching challenges both the teachers' teaching philosophy and students' learning styles. Confronted with the issues initiated by the fast development of information technology, the paper will focus on the ways to improve learners' communicative competence by using computer and network-based language teaching and learning.