Strategies to Foster EFL Learners Communicative Competence : Theoretical Bases and Implementation

Abstract

As in daily communication of learners of English as a foreign language inside the classrooms there exist no ideal speakers and hearers of the language, the goals of English language teaching have become more concerned with enabling those learners to produce at least an effective interlanguage, interact successfully, and overcome their communicative problems with their colleagues and with members of other societies by using some communication strategies. Accordingly, the present study dealt with the usefulness of teaching those techniques in English as a foreign language speaking contexts and providing opportunities to practise them for reaching a relevant communicative competence. Students of English as a foreign language in the faculty of Letters and Languages at Tlemcen University face a great number of communication difficulties when using the English language. Therefore, thinking of alternative ways to solve these problems would be the urgent task of teachers of this language to teach them through classroom activities during which learners use strategies that compensate for the breakdowns in communication and make the classroom lively. The dissertation provided examples of learners trying to express what they wanted to say once facing communicative inadequacies. Their solutions was to use one or more communication strategies. The results shed light on the idea that learners plan either to eliminate a problem by changing the topic or not participating in a conversation, or to cope with the difficulty.