Perceptions of the Communicative Efforts of American Students of Spanish

Abstract

municative competence in the foreign language classroom carries with it the need for measurement of attainment-a responsibility which charges the teacher with the realistic evaluation of a student's communicative proficiency-not in terms of the mastery of isolated grammatical elements, but rather in terms of the effectiveness of message transmission and reception. Accordingly, in evaluative procedures, attention to the form of an utterance must yield to a focus on the content or message conveyed. Since linguistic inaccuracy may, to a great extent, jeopardize the successful transmission of a message, the two elements, form and content, become basically inseparable. In evaluating communication in the target language the non-native teacher especially is faced with a number of questions regarding a student's communicative competence in real-life situations within the target language community: does the knowledge of the student's native language, English, interfere with the non-native teacher's ability to evaluate second-language communications properly? As speakers of the student's first language, we often know what the student is trying to say, but it is difficult, if not impossible, to judge these utterances consistently from a native speaker viewpoint. Powell states: Unfortunately, because few teachers are native speakers of the foreign language they teach and because even those who are have learned to interpret their students' meanings, it is impossible for them to consistently make corrections in terms of the comprehensibility of the students' utterances to non-English speaking natives.'' The non-native teacher may thus feel more comfortable in relying on students' linguistic competence as an indicator of their communicative competence. Yet Clark states that one of the most salient characteristics of real