Developing A Syllabus for Improving College Students' Communicative Competence in English

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This study was conducted to investigate the development of a more effective syllabus to assist Japanese college students improve their communicative competence in English. A series of analyses were made of TOEIC practice tests, ACTFL-like interview tests, and Michigan tests which were all performed on more than five hundred students during the 2002-2004 period. Their results indicated that the great difficulties they experienced in comprehension and production tasks derived from, first, lexical unfamiliarity, second, insufficient understanding of cultural content, and third, inadequate knowledge of English discourse development. It was suggested that if a syllabus for college students learning communicative competence in English is to be effective, it should teach them how to negotiate unknown vocabulary, and how to comprehend complex or "de-contextualized" discourse communication. A conclusion was that Japanese college students should be encouraged to acquire "academic communicative competence" beyond "everyday conversational fluency."