COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE AND COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING

      This article presents important information of communicative competence and communicative language teaching. Here are presented the theory of Chomsky, Hymes, Widdowson, Stern, Rios, Canale and Swain. The concept of communicative competence is initiated by Chomsky, who had the competence and performance. Hymes believes that Chomsky's theory does not describe the actual behavior of the language, so understand that your results are incomplete. Between the theory of Hymes and Chomsky I'm agree with Hymes's theory because he believes that we should worry about performance and actual use of language, while Chomsky is based on speaker-hearer knowledge. Hymes says "to reach a communicative competence has to be understanding and manufacturing productivity in both referential and social meaning of language." I believe that to be successful in teaching communicative competence, children must acquire knowledge of how socio-cultural, and relate to their lives and environment knowledge is acquired more easily and prevails.

     Widdowson also agree with this theory Hymes, but suggests that grammar should be based on semantic concepts and language skills help to achieve the communicative language. Channels and Swain are also agree with Hymes's theory, but his work focuses more on social interaction, grammar and meaning. I find it fascinating the way they come together and give importance to grammatical competence, communicative competence and socio-linguistic competence. Stern proposes that the teaching of communicative competence in language learning should hold an objective and analytical study using the practice of structural aspects, functional and socio-cultural in the context used by the real experiment. And Rios proposes methodological distinction between skill-getting and skill-using.

      To my knowledge all of these theories have contributed to the enrichment and development in communicative language teaching, but I understand that public schools in Puerto Rico is missing something to succeed in communicative language teaching English.   We have fascinating theories, studies and experiments that help us increase the quality of teaching communicative language as teachers we need to implement all the methods required to use alternatives for the student to acquire the knowledge.