On The Development Of English Learners' Interactive Communicative Competence

Interactive communication, typical of interpersonal exchanges, is achieved through the cooperation between the participants, who take turns to maintain the interaction by applying communicative strategies, conversational skills as well as nonverbal means, etc. However, in English teaching practice, we find many English learners, when involved in face-to-face interaction, just pay more attention to one-way presentation rather than to interactive communication, thus resulting in their weak communication performance or in communication failure. This paper addresses four aspects of the issue, emphasizing some strategies and skills to help develop English learners' interactive communicative competence.Chapter One first discusses the concept of "communicative competence" and some relative discussions about it, and then defines "interactive communicative competence".Since the author thinks the development of interactive communicative competence depends on the consciousness of interactive communication, Chapter Two mainly explores how authentic or realistic communication environment could be created to activate learners' interest in taking part in meaningful interactive activities so as to promote their consciousness of interactive communication.Communication strategies, which are problem-oriented, are employed by the learner when he lacks or cannot gain access to the linguistic resources required to express an intended meaning. Simply speaking, communication strategies are techniques to achieve communicative goals, especially when communication is difficult. So in oral communication, properly applying communication strategies can keep the interactive channel open and achieve the communication goals eventually. Chapter Three introduces some common communication strategies, and illustrates how to apply them in classroom interactive activities.Sometimes students have difficulty cooperating and communicating properly mainly because of lack of appropriate conversational skills. For example, the speaker takes long turns, not knowing "turn-yielding" and pausing appropriately while the hearer keeps silent, not knowing using "back-channel commentary" and "turn-getting" etc. So Chapter Four mainly deals with some basic rules and techniques such as initiating, maintaining, repairing, redirecting and terminating communication, turn-taking and so on, so as to help Chinese English learners know how to cooperate and establish communication relationship between participants.It is far from enough studying and practicing English in the classroom to effectively improve English learners' interactive communicative competence in real linguistic situation. Besides normal classroom teaching, teachers should encourage Chinese English learners to take an active part in interactive communication activities after class. Chapter Five offers some suggestions and some effective measures.In the end, a summary of the thesis is given and it is pointed out that it is absolutely inadequate at all that learners only confine their competence to one-way presentation according to the nature of interpersonal communication and the higher request of learners' communicative competence by the modern society. So in English teaching, when learners have achieved basic ability to understand others' utterances and to make one-way presentation, more attempts should be made to develop their interactive communication competence by helping them, especially those early or intermediate English learners, understand the nature of personal interaction, communication strategies, some conversational techniques etc, which is actually the fimdamental aim of English teaching.