Developing the Communicative Competence of Second-language Speakers

This work x-rays the place of literature in the development of the communicative competence of second language speakers. With the understanding that effective communication is the central thing in any second language situation, the work examines how best to achieve this. But the way the English language is taught at all the levels of education in Nigeria leaves a lot to be desired, and therefore does not hold a promise of actualising the very end of language teaching and learning, which is the development of learners¿ communicative competence. If literature is the colour of its language, teaching any language without its literature is bleaching that language. Any teaching method that adopts this antiseptic learning of the target language may not achieve much as literature presents the best examples or manifestations of language use, and would serve as a veritable point of encounter with the language, or what Stephen Krashen calls ¿comprehensible input¿ (87). The position of this work is that the divorce between ¿language¿ and ¿literature¿ in the educational curriculum is an anathema. This study was premised on the theoretical frame of communicative language teaching (CLT).