The Ministry of Higher and Secondary Specialized Education of the Republic of Uzbekistan

DEVELOPING STRATEGIC COMPETENCE IN THE SYSTEM OF ACADEMIC LYCEUM EDUCATION

Some issues in developing strategic competence in the classroom:
Let us now turn our attention to the question of whether we, as teachers, can do something to develop strategic competence in the classroom, rather than just leaving it to take care of itself. (By "doing something" I mean devising specific materials and activities.) Strategic competence is rarely given explicit and systematic treatment in our coursebooks, and one may wonder whether it is really worth adding an extra dimension to an EFL syllabus. This is why I would like to offer some preliminary points for discussion, that is
- is it possible to make communication strategies part of an EFL syllabus?
- is it useful to train students in the use of strategies?
- is it desirable, on wider pedagogic grounds, to do so?
Is it possible to make communication strategies part of an EFL syllabus?
First of all, is it possible to identify and describe communication strategies in the same way as is often done with vocabulary, grammar or functions? Can strategies be singled out from stretches of discourse? We have already looked at several examples of strategies, but that does not yet prove that we can build a coherent strategy syllabus.
There is a further word of warning I wish to sound in this respect. Describing communication strategies, especially at the discourse level, cannot mean producing a set of rules for their correct or appropriate use. We know that giving — and especially applying - rules is tricky enough even for apparently straightforward areas such as morphology and syntax. For example, the distinction between he, she and it is superficially simple, but what would a beginner student think when hearing somebody saying Congratulations! It’s a girl, and it‘s just like its mother! or, at a service station, hearing someone say to the assistant Fillher up!, meaning Fillup the car tank with petrol of course. And what about subtle differences in the use of tenses, for example I'll come to the office tomorrow vs I'll be coming to the office tomorrow? The problem is, even with morphology and syntax we cannot separate language use from its actual context and purpose so we can expect even more problems at the level of discourse. If we wish to identify and describe communication strategies, therefore, we must give up the idea of being prescriptive and giving rules, and limit ourselves to a descriptive approach: in other words, we can try to discover possible patterns and regularities between and across sentences, but we must treat these as probable, frequent behaviour in a given context, not as fixed, abstract norms.
Is it useful to train students in the use of strategies?
By "training" in this case I mean focusing the students’ attention on specific strategies, making them aware of why they are important, how they work and when they may come in useful, and also asking the students to practise the strategies in guided activities. Is this useful, or should we just provide activities where students are left free to practise and experience strategy use as they think it appropriate?
In a way, this takes us back to the more general question of what role formal instruction and reflection on language play in the development of communicative competence. We know that so far we can’t rely on any conclusive evidence in this respect, that is, explicit training does not automatically guarantee high communicative competence. Qn the other hand, there is no conclusive evidence, either, that ignoring formal instruction and reflection on language is a more successful approach. What I think we can safely say, and this reminds me of my own experience as a language learner, is that if we become more aware of certain language features, we stand a better chance of noticing these features in the language input we are exposed to; in other words, we may become more receptive to them, and can therefore hope to acquire them in an implicit way, and to gradually make them part of our own active repertoire.
Incidentally, we can also add that analysis and reflection are key features of some learning styles, as much as intuition and practical communication are of others. By providing our students with opportunities for using a variety of learning styles, we will be doing something for both our convergent, analytical learners on one side and for our divergent, memory-oriented learners on the other.
Of course not all communication strategies may be worth bringing to the students’ attention. We have already made the point that achievement, not avoidance, strategies can favour hypothesis formation and therefore learning: in other words, if learners stretch their resources to their fullest potential in order to reach their goal, their interlanguage can profit from being put to the test of real performance. However, once again, not all achievement strategies can be singild out for analysis and practice in the same way. It is relatively easy to teach ways of asking for clarification or keeping a conversation going; it is not so easy to teach turn-taking or topic-change procedures; I think it is even more difficult to teach ways of restructuring one’s utterances or using paraphrase to describe a difficult concept. So I wouid like to suggest that not all areas of strategic competence lend themselves equally well to specific practice in guided activities, and some are therefore perhaps best left to the studentsown initiative, as they happen to need them in free interaction tasks.
Is it desirable, on wider pedagogic grounds, to train students in strategy use?
We know that each of us, and each of our students, has his or her own individual interaction patterns and preferred verbal behaviour. Just look at how different students handle a simple information gap exercise, for example, where they have to describe a picture to their partner. Some pairs will take turns in speaking more or less on an equal basis; in other pairs, one student may lead the interaction, for example by asking most of the questions. Some students may choose to concentrate on a general description first, and to leave details till later; others may want to get a precise description of each detail right from the start. (This, of course, is just another example of individual differences: people have different learning styles, which in turn imply the use of different communication strategies.) If this is how people behave in actual interactions, we can hardly force them into a straightjacket of pre-selected strategies. Besides, the choice of a strategy is often unconscious and unintentional, and depds very much on the nature of the task, the nature of the problem, and the level of language proficiency.
This clearly points to a wider pedagogic issue. Most of us would agree that we should encourage spontaneity, creativity and originality in language use. The problem is, are these important aims achieved only through simple exposure to the language? In other words, should we leave everything to chance? And is the alternative to this only a strict control over language, an approach in which we pre-determine and pre-select the ways in which language should be used by our students? Especially when we are working at the discourse level, we know this would reduce interaction to the application of mechanical rules ... it would mean killing interaction itself.
There is a further danger in all this. For example, if we insist on the use of general words to make up for more specific terms, we may soon find that at least some of our students will tend to choose "the easy way out": if they know both daffodil and flower, but choose to use flower, they will stop developing their linguistic competence. We would then be encouraging fossilization, which would mean blocking the possibility of further learning and development of the interlanguage system.
Is a third way possible? Can we save the spontaneity of interaction while at the same time helping our students, especially those who most need it, to acquire a wider range of interaction patterns? Can we do this without running the risk of "over-teaching" strategies? I think that at the very least we would not really wish to directly "teach" how to cope with communication problems - we would rather want to lead our students to discover, discuss and develop their own strategies for doing so.