THE COMMUNICATION NEEDS OF SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS
Abstract
The functional/notional syllabus, created by British and European educators, is an organization toward language teaching based upon the communicative needs of the learner. A desire to facilitate the application of the new curricular alternative to second language learning in American schools, led to an experimental study among students of French and Spanish at the Universities of Indiana, Wisconsin, and Purdue in the Fall of 1981. The purpose of the study was to investigate the effect of one semester of university-level study abroad on advanced second language learners' perceptions of communication needs in order to contribute empirical data vis-a-vis the content of the functional/notional syllabus. The experimental groups consisted of the students who participated in the Year Abroad program at the Universities of Strasbourg, France and Madrid, Spain. A survey of communication needs (pretest) was administered shortly after arrival at the European university and again at the end of the semester (posttest). The same survey was given to randomly chosen third-year classes of French and Spanish on the home campuses during approximately the same two weeks of the semester. The control groups were comprised by pairing each experimental subject with a student from the third-year language classes who matched exactly on the variables previous study abroad and college credits in the foreign language, and as closely as possible on six other variables. The t-test for paired samples was employed to determine whether changes in perceptions of communication needs as a result of study abroad with respect to six major categories of language use were significantly different from students in the control groups at the end of the semester. The results revealed no significant differences between groups among both French and Spanish students ((alpha) = .05). The outcome of the experiment suggested that students in advanced study of a second language have realistic expectations of communication needs which do not change even after experience in the foreign environment. To that end, this study provides evidence that student perceptions of language functions can be utilized in the development of a curriculum organized according to the functional/notional concept.
Degree
Ph.D.
Subject Area
Language arts
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