A Study On The Relation Between Classroom Linguistic Input And Science Students’ Communicative Competence

Communicative competence has enjoyed wide attentions since its debutproposal. Soon afterwards, plenty of seminal efforts by other linguists, such asWiddowson (1975,1978), Canale&Swain (1980), Bachman (1990), have beencarried out to refine the theoretical framework. Based on Bachman’s model ofcommunicative competence, the present study, by investigating176science studentsand3English teachers from3universities in Xiangtan, mainly looks into the effect ofclassroom linguistic input on the cultivation of learners’ communicative competencevia three research instruments which are classroom observation, self-rating andinterviews, respectively.Classroom observation elicits data of teaching activity, with8class hours foreach university. The observation reveals that the language teaching at the threeuniversities is largely grammar-, text-and teacher-centered, while extralinguisticknowledge or skills, such as sociolinguistics, are seldom involved.The self-rating used in this study is designed by Bachman&Palmer (1982,1989) and130science students have participated. It is found that communicativecompetence of the vast majority of the science students stay at surprisingly low level,particularly their sociolinguistic competence. Most of the surveyed students tend to berelatively more grammatical and textual competent, obtaining more knowledge aboutgrammar and vocabulary, and basic knowledge of how to organize sentences into amore or less cohesive text. While sociolinguistic competence of most learners, ingeneral, is frighteningly deficient. Nearly all the surveyed students remain unable tovary their languages to interlocutors of different ages or backgrounds according todifferent speech contexts, and stay insensitive to the nativeness, naturalness andcultural references of English. In addition, learners at different universities, as a whole,are prone to be distinct in terms of communicative competence, largely due to thedifferent linguistic input they are supposed to during class, according to the findingsof the present study. Via data analysis and responses of teachers and students during the interviews,language proficiency is found to be more correlated with grammatical competence,and textual competence, rather than sociolinguistic competence, partly becauseknowledge of sociolinguistic are barely referred to in classroom linguistic input. Andclassroom linguistic input is also found to be positively correlated with thedevelopment of communicative competence. Learners who are exposed to moreknowledge-based input are likely to be more competent in the related communicativeknowledge. Likewise, if learners are exposed to more function-based input, they tendto be more competent in expression ability.