In response to: http://babel2.richmond.edu/web2/sdlap/BrownCh8.pdf
After reading this and discussing in class I have drawn some ideas that I found to be key in regards to Communicative Competence.
My main take-away from the article is that without context a sentence can have a variety of meanings and without learning the various styles of pronunciation you can end up in some sticky situations. The author of the article presented a statement about not liking a dinner. Without context you wouldn't know if the person was saying it in apology or in distaste. I found that interesting, without reading further I thought back to when I took Spanish in High School and my experience just thinking one sentence at a time. I felt as though I was operating like a computer. I then began to read further and sure enough the author mentions that most classes are not taught with context in mind.
This presented another chain of thought. When a person is immersed in a language they are forced to take context into account, could this be why people tend to learn a language with more ease when immersed? I think the logic of it makes sense, when you take context into play you think like a native and thus learn the language from its roots. If you learn a language in a classroom you tend to do it mechanically sentence by sentence and you are not really flowing ideas together seamlessly.
Overall I thought the article was interesting and thought provoking. I would like to see if there are any follow up articles that maybe delve further into the classroom with data that supports the claim one way or the other.
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