DEVELOPING COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE OF MEDICAL STUDENTS

Abstract

Communicative competence, as it has been outlined so far, has recently been criticized by a number of writers because it models itself on educated native speakers and takes their communicative competence as the ultimate goal of foreign language learning. This is problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, there is the difficulty of defining native speaker norms ‘in a time of large-scale migrations, cross-national and cross-cultural encounters, and increasing linguistic and pragmatic differences among speakers of the same language’. Even if we are able to agree on what constitutes native speaker competence, many question how appropriate this model is to learners, both because it sets the impossible target of becoming like a native speaker, something which could potentially de-motivate learners and which devalues the social identity and competences they have developed within their own culture, and because the communicative needs of non-native speakers are very different from native speakers existing in a particular speech community and vary according to the social context in which they wish to operate. The example given in vignette just proves that such non-linguistic factors as mentality norms, speech etiquette, history, culture impact on the speech greatly. One should take into consideration the above mentioned factors if he do wants to make his utterance clear and up to his expectations.