Speaking Activities for Communicative Competence in English Textbooks

Abstract

With higher requirements for communicative ability from increased worldwide interactions, the communicative approach has been enthusiastically taken into language teaching. Looking into various communicative teaching methods derived from this approach, this study specifically investigates how communicative competence could be cultivated through speaking activities in the 2015 revised versions of elementary English textbooks which are analyzed by two frameworks. One of the frameworks is taken from the theoretical framework of the communicative continuum (Littlewood, 2005). The other is the framework that categorizes the components of communicative competence from a pedagogical perspective (Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, & Thurrell, 1995). The results of this study indicate that, firstly, the average number of speaking activities in exercising formulaic structure is higher than that of the number of activities negotiating meaning. Activities focused on exercising formulaic structure include non-communicative learning (26.29%) and pre-communicative language practice (50.80%). Secondly, the most frequent categories of communicative competence are identified in linguistic competence (28.69%) and discourse competence (64.14%) which are mainly composed of lexico-grammatical building blocks in formulaic structures. According to the findings from this study, more meaning-oriented speaking activities such as communicative language practice and structured communication should be provided in systematic procedures to help learners gradually attain various components of communicative competence. In addition, situational variables and politeness strategies of sociocultural competence should be considered in speaking activities.