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As we all know, communication is an integral part of our daily life in that everybody needs to communicate with others to present his own ideas and feelings, to share information and beliefs, and to solve problems effectively and timely. In this respect, language is playing a significant role in terms of communication. Therefore it is greatly necessary to learn and develop language ability especially communication ability in English in order to keep up with the fast pace of globalization and more interaction in all aspects around the globe.
As for what communicative competence really is, many linguists have issued their own opinions such as Chomsky, Hymes, Canale and Swain. For example, Chomsky once pointed out, “communicative competence is primarily concerned with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech community, who knows the language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitation, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance” (Brumfit and Johnson 5). And the study for developing and improving communicative competence also has gone through many years. Many experts explored different teaching strategies. For example, pair and small-group work is widely accepted as an effective way to be adopted in oral English teaching.
But what we have to acknowledge is that the communicative competence of college students in China is not good. And some non-English majors’ communicative competence is nearly acceptable. One of the factors leading to this is that they are more likely to neglect the importance of oral English. Meanwhile, there are not creative teaching strategies adopted in the process of developing students’ oral communication ability. Some teachers still adhere to the tested-based educational system. Under this context, it is meaningful to study students’ actual oral communicative competence and analyze the result to make progress in both teaching and learning of oral English.
This thesis is composed of five parts: the first part is on communicative competence including its definition and development; the second part is about an investigation of the current condition of oral English communicative competence of non-English major students in Zhoukou Normal University; the third part is concerned about analyses of the results and findings about factors which may obstruct oral communicative competence acquisition and development; the fourth part is an exploration of learning strategies and teaching strategies for non-English major students to improve oral English communication ability; the fifth part is the conclusion for this thesis.
II. A Review of the Development of Communicative Competence Theories