SKKN Enhancing communicative competence for students through grammar lessons in English 10 – Global Success

PART A: INTRODUCTION

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. Rationale:

Together with the advancement of science and technology, English as an

international language has become an indispensable tool for integration and

development among countries around the world. To many people, travelling abroad

for holiday, for jobs, for study or for business is a common thing and not beyond

their means. That is the reason why the demand of communicating in English is

getting higher and higher. Thus, teaching and learning English in the context of

globalisation has become more and more essential. English as a compulsory subject

in the national curriculum not only helps students broaden their knowlege of the

language in the most coutries all over the world but also improve their competence

of using the language in communication in order to meet the demand of high quality

workforce for the job market in the future. Therefore, the Ministry of Education and

Training issued Circular 32/2018/TT-BGDĐT in which the curriculum of the

English subject focuses on the communicative competence and considers learnered-

center approach as the main point of the teaching and learning process. The level of

upper secondary education requires students to be able to use English as a

communication tool as well as to enrich the knowledge of English through

phonetics, vocabulary and grammar lessons. To meet the requirements, the authors

have been applying various methods to encourage students to build up their

confidence and promote their communicative competence not only in skill lessons

but also in grammar lessons to replace the traditional method of teaching English

grammar – teachered-center. That is the reason why we have decided to choose the

carry out the topic: “Enhancing communicative competence for students through

grammar lessons in English 10 – Global Success”.

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. Aim of the Study:

The topic was studied and applied with a view to enhancing the communicative

competence for grade 10 students through grammar lessons in the textbook English

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0 – Global Success. It is also served as a source of materials that help English

teachers improve speaking skill for their students.

Through this study, the topic has helped the writers draw experiences of developing

the students’ communicative competence by teaching grammar communicatively.

The writers’ experiences shown in this study may provide English teachers with a

source of materials to teach grammar lessons in such a way that helps to improve

students’ communication skill in general.

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. Scope of the study:

As mentioned at the beginning, the study attempts to figure out the methods of

teaching grammar communicatively for grade 10 students at Cua Lo high school.

Once successfully applied, a few activities used in teaching grammar towards

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communicative approach will be suggested at Cua Lo high school.

. Method of the Study:

Studying the materials about teaching grammar communicatively in reference

books and materials available in the Internet.

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Analyzing and drawing experiences from the process of teaching.

Applying in the real teaching to self-evaluate.

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. Novelty of the Study:

It is possible that the topic of teaching grammar communicatively is not really

new in the field. Our topic, however, focuses on the communicative competence of

students in the particular grammar lessons in the coursebook English 10 – Global

Success, which has just been published and used on a large scale in this school year.

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. Structure of the Study:

The Study is made up of three main parts as follow:

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Part A: Introduction: To introduce the topic of the study and provide an

overview of the topic

Part B: Contents: To work out the definition of the terms used as well as

develop the topic

Part C: Conclusion: To draw the result and the feasibility of the topic

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PART B: CONTENTS

1. THEORETICAL BASIS OF THE TOPIC:

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. Concept of teaching grammar communicatively

Generally, grammar shows the correct orders of words to make meaningful

sentences. “Grammar may be defined as the rules of a language, governing the way

in which words are put together to convey meaning in different contexts”.

(Nesamalar Chitravelu; Sararatha Sithamparam & The Soo Choon, 2005).

Traditional teaching methods follow the PPP pattern (short for Presentation –

Production – Practice) in which teachers present and illustrate the grammar rules and

students then use the prompts given to make similar sentences. In the Practice stage,

they continue praticing the controlled target laguage. For example, to teach the

present simple tense, the teacher introduces the verb form, the usage, the structures

and gives examples. Students take notes and follow the rules to put the verbs given

into the correcct form of the present simple tense. Then they practice making

sentences, using this verb form. In this model, the teacher plays the main role –

teacher-centered framework and learners study in a passive way – receiving the

“one-sided” knowledge. In this way, grammar points seem boring because they are

explained by teachers, memorized by students separately. Students focus on doing

exercises to indicate that they understand the lessons but they can hardly use these

rules to communicate. “The problem is not in grammar itself, but in the way, that

grammar has been taught and learned”. (https://elttguide.com/want-to-teach-

grammar-communicatively-its-so-simple-follow-these-3-tips/).

Teaching Grammar Communicatively means encouraging students to use

grammar points to communicate effectively in real life situations.

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. Concept of communicative competence

In a broad meaning, the concept of communicative competence is a very

complicated term, which has been researched by famous scholars in the world for

years. “The scientific history of the concept of communicative competence began in

the 1960s as a counter-movement against the so-called “linguistic competence”

introduced by the structural linguist Noam Chomsky (1965), who based linguistic

theory on an ideal speaker-listener with perfect linguistic knowledge, which is

supposed to be unaffected by cognitive and situational factors during actual

linguistic performance. Among others, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1970) and

the sociolinguist Dell Hymes (1972) argued that Chomsky’s concept could not serve

as a relevant component in a theory of real-life communication. Habermas argued

“that general semantics cannot be developed sufficiently on the narrow basis of the

monological linguistic competence proposed by Chomsky” (1970: 137–138). But

similar to Chomsky’s idea of an idealized speaker-hearer, he idealized the speech

situation: “Above all, communicative competence relates to an ideal speech situation

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