PERCEPTIONS OF INSERVICE TEACHER TRAINING NEEDS OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS IN THE AREA OF COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE
Abstract
The purpose of this study was to identify and compare the perceived teacher training needs of 127 elementary and high school foreign language teachers from the public schools of New York City in three areas of communicative competence: (a) principles of communicative competence, (b) communicative-based curriculum, and (c) communicative-based methodology. An original instrument, the Communicative Competence Survey (CCS), was developed by the researcher based on the theory of communicative competence of Canale and Swain (1979, 1980) in order to gather data in the three sub-dimensions of communicative competence. The demographic variables of age, ethnicity, years of teaching experience, degree earned, and foreign language taught, were investigated by the Personal Data Questionnaire (PDQ). Frequency distributions, percentage responses, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and correlation statistics were used to test three hypotheses related to the perceptions of elementary and high school foreign language teachers on the sub-dimensions of the theory of communicative competence. The minimal level of significance accepted for hypotheses two and three was.05. Overall, the findings suggested that teachers were generally in agreement with respect to the training needs of foreign language teachers on the three areas of the theory of communicative competence. Some significant relationship was found in the mean scores of elementary school foreign language teachers on the sub-dimensions of theory of communicative competence, communicative-based curriculum, and communicative-based methodology. However, among high school foreign language teachers the only significant relationship found was between theory of communicative competence, and communicative-based curriculum. The findings and conclusions of this study provided implications for curriculum specialists, supervisors and teachers of foreign language concerned with the implementation of communicative-based instruction. The implications for curriculum specialists were related to the development of functional curricula based on every-day situations, activities, and the implementation of curricula which manipulate language. For supervisors of foreign languages, the major implication concerned adapting communicative competence curricula for local use. Inservice training in communicative competence related to student-teacher interaction, the use of textbooks and other strategies were the major implications for foreign language teachers.
Subject Area
Curricula|Teaching
Recommended Citation
ACUNA-REYES, RITA, "PERCEPTIONS OF INSERVICE TEACHER TRAINING NEEDS OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS IN THE AREA OF COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE" (1987). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI8725666.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI8725666
