Summarizes research findings on achievement and attitudes in foreign language learning appearing in Communicative Competence: An Experiment in Foreign Language Teaching'', published by The Center for Curriculum Development, Philadelphia, Pa., 1972. (DS)

A conversation with the author's 7-year-old son who is just beginning to learn French serves to illustrate the concept of communicative competence and its implications for second-language teaching and testing. Communicative competence is defined as the ability to engage in spontaneous, interpersonal transactions, in contrast to linguistic…

The language teacher must provide a variety of activities in the classroom in which the student can use the second language in unrehearsed, novel situations requiring, on his part, inventiveness, resourcefulness and self-assurance. There should be less emphasis on linguistic accuracy and more on truly spontaneous and creative language. In the…

Communicative competence, the ability to use a language effectively in unrehearsed transactions with native speakers, must be the ultimate goal of language teaching. Drills and repetition of patterned phrases do not, in and of themselves, lead to real language use. We should begin giving students opportunities to use language in unrehearsed,…

Communicative competence can be defined as the ability to function in a truly communicative setting, that is, in a dynamic exchange in which linguistic competence must adapt itself to the total informational input, both linguistic and paralinguistic, of one or more interlocutors. The research described in this book focuses on the development of…