THE COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH AND THE SKILLS APPROACH: ADVANTAGES, LIMITATIONS, POTENTIAL EXPLOITATIONS IN THE TEACHING/LEARNING OF ORAL LANGUAGE IN FRENCH CLASSES IN MOROCCAN QUALIFYING SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Abstract

Since the eighties, many pedagogues of the teaching of French as a second language advocate new approaches which change the didactic landscape; among them, are the Communicative Approach and the Competence Approach. In this regard, we wonder if these changes also affected Morocco. In the Communicative Approach, the teaching of a language must have communicative purposes. The Competency-Based Approach focuses on the construction of competencies by practicing in real complex situations. In the field of French as a second language, considering the oral language is an enriching element of the language.Nevertheless, teachers still struggle to consider it a teaching object in its own right. In our investigation, the problematic consists of what the two approaches implemented develop the acquisition of the communicative competence of Moroccan high school students. We aim to prove that the said approaches have caused significant changes in their level of oral production. In this perspective, we propose to proceed, theoretically, to a qualitative analysis of the conception of the teaching/learning of the oral language recommended by the recent institutional texts; it is about the Pedagogical Orientations of 2007. Subsequently, and concerning the practical analysis, we consider two oral production activities following the guidelines of the two approaches. For this purpose, we base ourselves on the communicative textbook "Français" programmed for the second year of secondary school. As for the competency-based approach, our reference is "Les Œuvres Intégrales", a textbook for the first year of the baccalaureate. In this section, we analyze the course of the activities and the strategies used by the teacher to bring his learners to communicate effectively through spontaneous interactions. In this regard, we verify if the adoption of the two approaches is able to reinforce the communication competence of the teachers