38
Figure III: Proposed revised schematic representation of communicative competence by Celce-Murcia 2008
From Bachman ’s 1990 and Celce-Murcia’s 2008 communicative
competence models, it is implied that the students should be facilitated to develop their competence. These communicative competence models are matched with the
language competences that should be mastered by the students as the curicullum by the government mandate.
e. The Pre-communicative and Communicative Activities Framework
There are various frameworks offered by different experts in the CLT activities in the classroom. Three of them are the mechanical, meaningful, and
communicative practices by Richards 2006, the pre-communicative and communicative activities by Littlewood 1981, and the contextualized language
teaching by Nunan 2006. However from these three framework, the Littlewood’s framework can represent them all.
Pre-communicative and communicative activities differ in some ways Littlewood, 1981. Through pre-communicative activities, the teacher
39 isolates specific elements of knowledge or skill which compose communicative
ability, and provides the learners with opportunity to practice them separately. The learners are thus being trained in the part-skills of communication
rather than practising the total skill to be acquired. While in communicative activities, the learners have to activate and integrate their pre-communicative
knowledge and skills, in order to use them for the communication of meanings. They will then practice the total skill of communication.
Littlewood 1981 depicts his framework of pre-communicative and communicative activities in the following figure.
Figure IV: Methodological framework of pre-communicative and communicative activities
a
Pre-communicative Activities
The pre-communicative activities provide the students opportunities to learn the grammatical competence that is needed in the communicative activities. They
consist of structural and quasi-communicative activities. It aims to prepare the students to be able to perform in the communicative activities. The main focus of
the structural activity is the activities related to the vocabulary, grammar, and
40 pronunciation exercises. Meaningful repetition is very important to avoid
boredom and to make the students feel at ease in coping with them. In the quasi-communicative activities, the students are provided with the
restricted communicative activities. They will rehearse producing utterances in the limited focus selected by the teacher to be used in the communicative activities.
b Communicative Activities
Purposes of communicative activities are to provide ‗whole’ task practice, to improve motivation, to allow natural learning, and to create a context which
supports learning. There are two kinds of communicative activities. They are the functional communicative activities and the social interaction which are described
as follows.
1 Functional Communicative Activities
In functional communicative activities, the teacher structures the situation so that the learners have to overcome an information gap to solve a problem. The key
is that the learners must work towards a definite solution or decision. The range is limited because of the classroom situation but through the materials used, there is
a wide scope for varying the content and complexity of the language that is needed.
Littlewood 1981 groups these activities into two: a using language to share information and b using language to process information.
2 Social Interaction
Social interaction activities approximately are closer to the kinds of communication situation encountered outside the classroom, where language is
41 not only a functional instrument, but also a form of social behaviour. The learner
is expected to let social as well as functional considerations affect his choice of language. Thus, the language he produces will be evaluated in terms of its social
acceptability as well as its functional effectiveness Klippel 1984 gives many examples of communicative activities for
speaking. He divides the activities into three headings. They are the question and answers, discussions and decisions, and stories and scences. The question and
answer activities consist of warming-up exercises, interviews, guessing games, jigsaw tasks, and questioning activities. Discussions and decisions include ranking
exercises, discussion games, value clarification techniques, thinking strategies, and problem-solving activities. The stories and scenes include miming, role play
and simulations, and stories. The activities are various. Teachers may directly use the activities or redesign
it to meet the class’ need. Teachers can be so creative in developing the activities.
f. Learners’ and Teacher’s Roles
