Communicative language teaching and the communicative competence

Abstract

The communicative approach is focused on the development of communicative competence. CLT is based on the idea that language learning is successfully achieved by having to communicate real meaning. When students engage in real communication, their natural strategies for language acquisition will be used and this will allow them to learn to use language fluently, therefore it is considered a successful approach in the teaching-learning process. The main purpose of this research was to explore the perception of the students about the Communicative Language Teaching in the communicative competence. This research had a qualitative-quantitative research approach and a descriptive research level. Likewise, the population consisted of 80 students of the first and second year of high school of Bilingual Educational Center "La Granja". Additionally, for the data collection process, a survey was carried out which was validated by three experts from the career. The survey was addressed to students and teachers in order to identify the importance and benefits of the Communicative Teaching approach of the Language in Communicative Competence; each survey included 20 multiple-choice questions and the options were built based on the Likert scale. In addition, the Chi-square test was applied to test the hypothesis and the effectiveness of the CLT approach in the development of communicative competence. Finally, the results showed that the Communicative Language Teaching approach has a positive impact on the development of communicative competence, which implies that this approach should be used both in students and teachers during the teaching-learning process.