Students’ Attitudes towards Developing Communicative Competence through Communicative Tasks

Abstract

The current dissertation tackles the investigation of learners’ attitudes towards the development of communicative competence via the use of communicative tasks in foreign classrooms. It has been noticed that major factor hindering students to achieve communicative competence is their negative attitudes towards it and it is due to the lack of exposure to the target language, so that many students are unable to communicate successfully in the target language as they do in their First Language (L1). This is mainly due to the great importance that is given by teachers to teach grammatical perfections of language rather than communicative ones. That is to say, the lack of competence and poor performance of students illustrate that they require practicing the language frequently within and out the classes in order to satisfy their communicative needs.The adopted hypothesis states that using communicative tasks would promote students to develop positive attitudes towards developing communicative competence. As far as the field work is concerned, we rely on two main descriptive instruments of investigation which are the questionnaire that is administrated to second year English students at Abd Elhafid Boussouf University, Center of Mila, and the interview is devoted to teachers at the same university. As a result, we get some answers and suggestions from both students and teachers that seem to be positively significant and valuable in accomplishing our study. Based on the findings, the majority of the respondents reflect students’ attitudes showing that the use of Task-Based Approach does really promote learners’ communicative competencies, they have affirmed that language tasks provide learners with adequate practice for expressing meaning, and interacting effectively. All in all, the gathered results demonstrate that second year students At Mila University have positive attitudes towards the effectiveness of communicative tasks in developing positive attitudes towards communicative competence . On the other hand, the obtained data show that teachers prove the importance of language tasks in enhancing students to develop positive attitudes towards communicative competence.