Functions of Language

Another linguistic theory of communication supporting CLT is Halliday’s functional account of language use. He described seven basic functions for children learning their first language.

Richards & Rogers classified them as (1986: P70-71):

‘the instrumental function: using language to get things;

the regulatory function: using language to control the behaviour of others;

the interactional function: using language to create interaction with others;

the personal function: using language to express personal feelings and meanings;

the heuristic function: using language to learn and discover;

the imaginative function: using language to create a world of the imagination;

the representational function: using language to communicate the information’

Halliday’s language functions were adopted by the proponents of CLT as denoting the linguistic means to perform different kinds of functions. His dogmas have had a strong influence on the development of functional syllabuses.

Another impelling force for a different language pedagogy came from the changing of education realities in Europe. The social and political pressures on language teaching promoted a more semantic, more social and more communicative approach.

Wilkins (1976) outlined a taxonomy of concepts for this kind of syllabus. His semantic classification was based on three categories: semantico-grammatical, modal, meaning and communicative functions.

The Council of Europe incorporated his semantic communicative analysis into a ‘threshold level’ communicative language syllabus. It specified situations, learners’ roles, settings, functions and notions (van Ek: 1975).

These specifications have had a strong influence on the design of communicative language programmes and the ideas were taken up in a number of text books.

Communicative Value of Language

Other linguists have addressed the communicative and social potentials of language.

Widdowson (1978) defined a set of contrasting concepts which distinguish between language as a formal system and language use as communicative values in discourse. He argued that language teaching should move away from an emphasis on the ‘usage’ of sentences in isolation to a concern for the ‘use’ of sentence in context. Discourse analysis should examine the use of sentences and makes a distinction between ‘cohesion’ and ‘coherence’. The former involves the employment of linguistic features in establishing the links in a piece of discourse, while the latter is concerned with the links which are established through the meaning and the content of the message.

His theory forms the basic concept of CLT which characterises the teaching of language in contextual situations and meaningful interaction.

Interactive Nature of Communicative Competence

Canale and Swain (1980) adopted the term communicative competence to refer to the relationship and interaction between grammatical and sociolinguistic competence.

Canale and Swain advocated (1980: P.6):

‘If a communicative approach to second language teaching is adopted, then principles of syllabus design must integrate of both grammatical and sociolinguistic competence.’

They identified four components of communicative competence: grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic and they regarded them as (1980: P.20):

‘a synthesis of knowledge of basic grammatical principles, knowledge of how a language is used in social context to perform communicative functions and knowledge of how utterance and communicative functions can be combined according to discourse.’

They also viewed such theories as:

‘an integrative in that they focus on speaking, listening, writing and reading rather than on a subset of these skill areas.’

Canale and Swain took the theory a big step closer to the classroom and the teaching of language as a social tool.