mmunication situations within a given speech community and culture. It includes, among other things, knowing how to initiate and manage conversations and negotiate meaning with other people. It also includes knowing what sorts of body language, eye contact, and proximity to other people are appropriate, and acting accordingly, e. g.conversation with a checker at the check-out line in a grocery store in the US or England shouldn t be very personal or protracted, as the purpose of the conversation is mainly a business transaction and it would be considered inappropriate to make the people further back in the queue wait while a customer and the checker have a social conversation. Other cultures have different rules of interaction in a market transaction.
Cultural competence is the ability to understand behavior from the standpoint of the members of a culture and to behave in a way that would be understood by the members of the culture in the intended way. Cultural competence therefore involves understanding all aspects of a culture, but particularly the social structure, the values ??and beliefs of the people, and the way things are assumed to be done, e. g. it is impossible to speak Korean or Japanese correctly without understanding the social structure of the respective societies, because that structure is reflected in the endings of words and the terms of address and reference that must be used when speaking to or about other people.
1.4 Methodological aspects of teaching communication
The technology of communicative language teaching is based on using of various methodical techniques of _ractice situations of real interaction and the organization of pupils group activity (in steams, in small groups) for the purpose of the joint decision of communicative problems.
In its purest form, a communicative activity is an activity in which there is:
· a desire to communicate
· a communicative purpose
· a focus on language content not language forms
· a variety of language used
· no teacher intervention
· no control or simplification of the material [23; 95].
Let s examine each characteristic in turn.
1. A desire to communicate. In a communicative activity there must be a reason to communicate. When someone asks a question, the person must wish to get some information or some other form of result. There must be either an information gap or an opinion gap or some other reason to communicate.
2. A communicative purpose. When we ask students to describe their bedroom furniture to their partners, we are creating an artificial communicative purpose and making the activity more artificial by asking them to do it in English. We also create artificial information gaps by giving different information to pairs of students so that they can have a reason to exchange information.
3. A focus on language content not language forms. In real life, we do not ask about our friend s family in order to _ractice have got forms. We ask the question because we are interested in the information. That is to say, we are interested in the language content and not in the language forms.
4. A variety of language is used. In normal communication, we do not repeatedly use the same language forms. In fact, we usually try to avoid repetition. In many classroom activities we often try to create situations in which students will repeatedly use a limited number of language patterns. This is also artificial.
5. No teacher intervention. When you are buying a ticket for The Lion King at the theatre, your teacher is not usually beside you to help or correct your English. Teacher intervention in classroom communicative activities adds to the artificiality.
6. No control or simplification of the material. In the classroom, we often use graded or simplified materials as prompts for communicative activities. These will not be available in the real world.
The main activity form in which communication is realized presents in the group work.
The goals of group work. The following description of the goals of group work focuses on the spoken use of language. There are several reasons for this focus. Firstly, group work is most commonly used to get ...
