A Study Of The Problems And Countermeasures In Fostering Oral English Interactive Communicative Competence Of College Students

In response to Hymes' theory of Communicative Competence, many other researchers proposed their various perspectives on competence and performance. According to Canale and Swain's framework, communicative competence consists of four major components: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, and strategic competence. Grammatical competence refers to the degree to which the language user has mastered the linguistic code; Sociolinguistic competence refers to the extent to which the second language can be used or understood appropriately in various contexts to convey specific communicative functions; Discourse competence involves the ability to combine ideas to achieve cohesion in form and coherence in thought. Strategic competence refers to the use of verbal and nonverbal communication strategies to compensate for gaps in the language user's knowledge of the code or for breakdown in communication because of performance factors. A learner's oral proficiency will be judged from the above four aspects.With the implementation of college English teaching reform, we are glad to find that the "deaf-and-dumb English" phenomenon in English teaching has taken a favorable turn. However, quite a few students still have great difficulty in interactive communication, and they often feel at a loss when involved in face-to-face interaction. When meeting some unfamiliar concepts and words, some students don't know what to do and only keep silent and feel embarrassed; they don't know how to initiate, maintain and terminate a conversation, nor do they know how to maintain the interaction in a natural way. All these phenomena imply that their communicative competence can only be called "one-way-presentation", which is far from the real communicative competence—"interactive communicative competence." Hence, it's urgent for us language educators to improve students' oral interactive communicative competence.After an investigation, this author finds out the problems existing in the process of teaching and learning oral English, and then on the basis of the analysis and discussion of the data. She has discussed how to develop the students' oral interactive communicative competence.This thesis consists of four major parts besides the introduction and conclusion.Chapter one reviews the relevant researches of communicative competence both at home and abroad. Chapter two discusses the theoretical background, giving a detailed description of the components of interactive communicative competence. In chapter three, the author carries out an investigation in which the problems are exposed, followed by an analysis and discussion of the data collected, which aims to probe into the current situation of the teaching and learning of college English oral classes. Chapter four presents some suggestions to enhance students' interactive communicative competence: 1. To create a preferable interactive language environment. The oral English teaching materials should be authentic, teachable and learnable; and the classroom activities should be interactive; teachers should take advantage of modern teaching facilities in language teaching. 2. To teach oral interactive communicative skills in class. 3. To improve interactive communicative elements in term oral test. In the end, a summary is given and it is pointed out that it is important for teachers and students to attach great importance to interactive communicative competence.