Communicative Competence and Oral Language Usage of Filipino Learners in English

Abstract

Communicative competence is heavily emphasized under the K-12 Basic Education Curriculum as language is the primary instrument of thought. Hence, the goal of this study is to create speaking activities to reinforce communicative competence and oral language usage with a total of 154 Grade 9 learners using stratified random sampling. A researcher-made questionnaire was used to assess the student respondents’ perceived communicative competence and oral language usage. Results showed that students were “advanced” in communicative competencies such as grammar competence, discourse competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence. The English language, on the other hand, is “often” used at home, on different platforms, and in the community. This demonstrated that the student respondents’ communicative competence was significantly related to their use of oral language. In this regard, the findings imply that speaking activities will strengthen students’ communicative competence toward oral language used to ensure maximum participation and use of the target language shortly, where students can approach speaking as a way to negotiate to mean and establish social relations with others.

Keywords

• communicative competence
• oral language usage
• target language
• discourse competence
• sociolinguistic competence
• strategic competence