A systematic way of teaching Academic English

Abstract

　Communicative competence is a concept introduced by Hymes and discussed and redefined by many scholars. Hymes’ original idea was that speakers of a language must have more than grammatical competence in order to be able to communicate effectively in a language. The framework of communicative competence in communicative language use includes four components; grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, and strategic competence. The author begins by considering the notion of discourse competence as a concept that accounts for the knowledge elements and skills employed by academic writers. In this article, the author discusses aspects of the development of academic English skills in the development of text structure and organization, lexical cohesion, and grammatical cohesion (conjunction) in the EFL class in Japan.