The Communicative Competence of the English Language Teachers and The Teaching of English as a Second Language
Ilocos Sur Polytechnic State College
ABSTRACT
With the advent of various educational innovations in the Philippine educational system such as the K-12 and OBE and the impact of ASEAN 2015 in the education sector, the importance of English and the demand to teach the learners a working command of English to satisfy various communicative needs in their lives, teachers have felt an urge to acquire certain proficiency in English. Teachers of English recognize that traditional pedagogy, emphasizing the acquisition of grammar and vocabulary rather than communicative competence, does not meet the requirements of English learning in an era of integration and globalization. Using a descriptive- documentary/critical/exploratory research design, this study necessitated the participation of forty (40) best English language teachers from the three Department of Education (DepEd) divisions of the province of Ilocos Sur, Philippines. The study assessed the proficiency of the teacher trainees, through their scores in pre and post tests during a five-day intensive training dubbed as READ and SPELL. The Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching (COLT) observation scheme by Spada, Fröhlich and Allen (1985) and in depth interviews were also administered to verify the data. Results reveal the strong impact of READ and SPELL training to the teachers in their teaching skills and methodologies, materials development and testing and evaluation. They also admit the significance of communicative language teaching in their respective classroom context.
KEYWORDS
communicative competence, contrastive analysis, communicative language teaching, teaching English as a second language