Classroom Communicative Competence and Conversational Routines/Patterns for Interactive L2 Users in the Japanese EFL Context

Abstract

　　The aim of this paper is twofold: to argue for the need of recasting the construct of communicative competence (CC) in view of the low efficiency of current English education in Japan; and to contend that knowledge of and skills in conversational routines/patterns (CRPs) lie at the core of the recast CC, classroom communicative competence (CCC). We first discuss a drawback of the global sense of CC as the goal of English education in Japan on the ground that every context demands a particular CC. It is suggested that the CC, required for our students to participate in and learn from classroom experiences and to become interactive L2 users, should be context-specific and hence appropriate to the reality of the classroom. We then scrutinize the pedagogical adequacy of CRPs as the basis of CCC drawing research evidence from applied linguistic studies to date. It has been found that CRPs are heavily used in everyday interactions and have critical characteristics for efficient communication, for instance, stored and retrieved as a whole and functionally associated with a particular social discourse. However, despite their importance in successful communication and language acquisition, CRPs have been rather neglected in language teaching. This paper concludes by suggesting ways of how we can make CCC develop during the course of successive years of English education at Japanese schools.