ESL Learner



ESL Learner

Introduction

This essay will explore the communicative approach and performance of an ESL through a piece of content produced. English as a Second Language (ESL) education has changed greatly over the past few decades. Earlier popular teaching methods—the grammar-translation method, the direct instruction method, and the audio-lingual method—no longer dominate current approaches. The primary function of language is communication and interaction. Improving students' communicative competence has emerged as the new focus in language instruction. Communicative competence as the use of language in social communications without grammatical analysis. Pedagogical changes have also occurred in the role of technology in the language learning area. As the Internet became more readily accessible, computer-mediated interactions between users in different locations increased. The concept of communication strategy came into existence as a result of the inadequacy of the old theories to offer a clear conception of what it means to know a language. None of the theories of communicative competence were adequate for a communicative approach to language learning because they did not take into consideration the communicative strategies that the learners employ in order to cope with the communicative problems arising in the course of communication.



Literature Review

The goal of English language teaching is to develop the learners' communicative competence which will enable them to communicate successfully in the real world. Communicating successfully refers to passing on a comprehensible message to the listener. Communicative competence has been one of the great key-words and buzz-words of language teaching for many years. It still is. In recent years, there has been a certain amount of controversy as to what the concept actually comprises, and whether all those, for example, pupils have to learn to do is talk. Canale (1983) believed that communicative competence comprised of grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence and strategic competence. Strategic competence refers to the individual's ability to use communication strategies, e.g., paraphrase, circumlocution, literal translation, lexical approximation, mime, to get their message across and to compensate for a limited or imperfect knowledge of rules or the interference of such factors such as fatigue, distraction or inattention.

It is difficult to find a rigorous definition of Communication Strategies which Communication Strategy researchers have reached an agreement on. There have been many definition proposals for the communication strategies of the second language learners. The following two definitions will provide us with an insight into the nature of communication strategies.

• Learners' attempt to bridge the gap between their linguistic competence in the target language and that of the target language interlocutors (Tarone, 1981, p. 288).

• The conscious employment by verbal or non verbal mechanisms for communicating an idea when precise linguistic forms are for some reasons not available to the learner at that point in communication (Brown, 1987, p. 180).

Karimnia and Izadparast (2007) asserted that strategic competence was composed of verbal and non-verbal strategies of communication that might be employed to compensate for communication breakdown attributable to performance variables or to insufficient competence. However, there is no agreement among researchers over taxonomy of communication ...