Communicative competence in ELT

When reading Alptekin’s article “Towards intercultural communicative competence in ELT” I was surprised to read about the contrasting views of communicative competence teaching.  For my comprehensive exams to earn a Master’s in Spanish Pedagogy and TESOL, I read several books on communicative competence teaching and learned about the four competencies: grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic.  I also learned the benefits of communicative competence teaching and how to use this method for teaching a foreign language as well as teaching English as a second language.  When I read that this article questions the validity of the pedagogical model whose focus is on native speaker competence in the target language setting, I was intrigued.  The paper discussed many things I had not thought about before.  For example when learning about communicative language teaching, I had not thought about the variety of dialects within the English language.  How can we teach certain language patterns over others when there is not a “correct” English language?  Alptekin explains, “Only by producing instructional materials that emphasize diversity both within and across cultures can one perhaps avoid presenting English meanings in fragmented and trivialized ways, where communicative functions are conceived as simple speech acts realized through specific structures, and where situational content generally portrays an idealized image of the English-speaking culture” (5).  She also explains that communicative competence often portrays and “idealized” portrait of the English language and culture.  In addition, she explains communicative competence, with its standardized native speaker norms, fails to reflect the lingua franca status of English.  This article focuses on the fact that a new pedagogical model is needed to accommodate the case of English as a means of international and intercultural communication.  This was an interesting article because it helped open my eyes to the fact that as English language teachers, we should consider implications for appropriate pedagogies and instructional materials that will help learners become successful bilingual and intercultural individuals who are able to function well in both local and international settings.