Reconsiderations For "Language Use"--One Of The Teaching Principles Of C.A.

This thesis reconsiders some theoretical ideas of the Communicative Approach, four key concepts in particular, underlying one of its teaching principles claiming that language is a tool for communication and the ultimate goal of language teaching is to enable language learners to acquire "Communicative Competence", which means to use the target language appropriately to communicate with different people on social occasions of various kinds. (Alan Maley 1985, Li Guangyi 1989, Ma Yingchu 1992, p.40).This thesis consists of three chapters.After a critical look at two concepts, namely, "Two-level meaning" of language units and "Rules of use", chapter one argues that by asserting the existence of the "Rules of use", C.A. seems to put too much faith into Empiricism in solving the problem of language use. Actually, a variety of pre-communicative approaches, Inductive or Deductive, have dealt seriously with language use and practice, but no one alone has succeeded in doing so due to their individual partialness and narrowness resulting from their adoption of either Empiricism or Rationalism only. Therefore, the traditional distinction between the two notions, though overlooked by the proponents of C.A., is of great value for our current foreign language teaching. Whatever approach we may choose in language teaching, we must in the first place try to seek for a relatively comprehensive idea about the nature of human language and its relationship with the individual human mind and society through the reconciliation between Empiricism and Rationalism.Chapter two states that there are some problems with Hymes' definition of "Communicative Competence", suggesting that this notion makes over-simplified conclusions on the uniformity in the social-culturalvalues adopted by a group of people from the same language community.In chapter three, I attempt to point out the narrowness of C.A. in terms of its views on the nature of language and its relationship with society. It is pointed out that by putting too much stress on the "Appropriacy" of language use, C.A. is likely to lead us to the view of seeing language learning merely as a process of acquiring a new set of social-cultural values and behavioral patterns. At the root of C.A, there is a possible confusion between teaching how to perform certain social functions with language with the teaching of communicative values of linguistic units. Also in this chapter I put forward two possible descriptions of the relationship between language system and its realization in people's social behavior. Accordingly, there are two possible ways to describe the process of language learning, that is, the "Marked" and "Unmarked" version of socialization. In addition, I present some characteristics of the marked version adopted by C.A. to indicate its inadequacy in describing language learning and teaching. Finally, I put forward that instead of being a process of substituting a new set of behavioral patterns for that that language learners have already acquired, foreign language learning should be seen as a process of personal emancipation with learners being added with new insights and understandings of the social-cultural values of the target language community. On the other hand, in teaching practice, teachers are advised, instead of adhering to just one approach, such as C.A, to seek for the most effective way of teaching through the reconciliation of various approaches in solving the problem of language use.