Quest Journals

Journal of Research in Humanities and Social Science

Volume 6 ~ Issue 12 (2018)pp.:08-10
ISSN(Online):2321-9467
[Link]

Research Paper

A Study on Developing Reading, Literary Competence and the

Communicative Approach
Diwakar Prahaladaiah
Research Scholar, Department of Education, Christ University, Bengaluru, India.

ABSTRACT:English has been taught and learnt as second language in our country for years. Language
teaching in general has been viewed as teaching the four skills of language, namely LSR and W for a long time.
But with the changes in the creative nature of language and its ever changing roles in the recent years, English
language has acquired the status of an international language and the language of internet. The need for
identifying a language for communication with the other, whose language is not one‘s mother tongue, has all
the more become highly important. English language has been identified for this purpose as it is the language of
business, used both in transacting the business of everyday living and in building social and personal relations.
So our country needs English, primarily not for social survival but as an additional language. Such a language
serves one‘s cognitive needs and in the retrieval and generation of knowledge. “We need it as a language of
learning a language that can satisfy many cognitive needs" Tickoo, 1991. [4]
KEY WORDS: LSRW, international language, communication, cognitive needs

Received 02 December,2018;Accepted 08 December,2018 © The Author(S)2018.

Published With Open Access At [Link].

I. INTRODUCTION
Language in its natural manifestation is essentially communication. Communication therefore is what
language learners have to be taught and classrooms therefore, should provide the context for users of language
which are as close to authentic communication as possible. Another function that language can perform in a
country like ours is the 'mathetic' Halliday, 1975, 1985 function. [10]
Having thus established the need for teaching English, the ways of promoting language acquisition and
the different skills that need promotion are discussed in the following sections of this article.
Theories and models of language acquisition have tended to focus on the role of oral language.
However many studies have revealed the importance of reading in the acquisition of language. Development of
competence in a second language requires „not systematization of language input or maximization of planned
practice but conditions in which learners engage in an effort to cope with communication‟ Prabhu, 1987 [7]
Languages are acquired by understanding messages rather than merely producing them. “We do not
acquire language by producing it or learning about it" Krashen, 1989.
Drawing on current understanding of language use as social behaviour, purposeful, and always in
context, proponents of communicative language teaching offer a view of the language learner as a partner in
learning; they encourage learner participation in communicative events and self assessment of progress. The
hidden agenda in such a situation for the learner is to is take communicative risks and to focus on the
development of strategies for understanding and decoding message in print.
Earlier, language teaching was looked at as teaching communication in terms of language skills LSR
and W. These skill categories were widely accepted and they were collectively described as active skills, such as
speaking and writing and passive skills such as reading and listening. However today, listeners and readers are
no longer regarded as passive. They are seen as active participants in the negotiation of meaning. Schemata,
expectations and top-down / bottom-up processing are among the terms now used to capture the necessarily
complex interactive nature of this negotiation. The development of reading thus becomes important.

The Place of Reading:

Reading is a complex interaction of automatic and intentional cognitive processes involving all kinds
of prior knowledge which the reader brings to the reading tasks. This includes bringing with him/her the
knowledge of content, knowledge of „rhetorical‟ structure, linguistic knowledge, knowledge of the word and so

Corresponding Author: Diwakar Prahaladaiah 8 | Page

 A Study on Developing Reading, Literary Competence and The Communicative Approach

on and thus reading becomes a function of both reader, and text variables and their interaction during reading.
Reading has been looked at as the primary source of language input for learners. “Reading comprehension is a
function of the interaction of the text
structure with readers formal schemata” Urquart, 1984. [1]
Further, as comprehending of the new structure or a vocabulary item in input is effected by means of
contextual and extra linguistic clues, it can be said that reading promotes acquisition of the target language.
“Comprehensible input under the right condition is... the essential ingredient for acquisition” Krashen, 1983
Further reading has what is called the transfer of „training effect„ and is a „general power„ West, 1926 which
once learned in one language can show itself in the reading of another and hence the primacy of reading in any
language- teaching programs.
‘What is reading?’ is the next question that is discussed in the following section. Reading, as Frank
Smith 1980 observes, is an amalgamation of the visual and non-visual experience. But this perception differs
with the context and the material to be read and also with the differing purposes of reading which include
reading for learning school related reading for pleasure and reading for survival to serve immediate needs, for
example, a stop sign on the road. In this paper, the attempt is on looking at reading a text as the verbal record of
a communicative act Brown and Yule 1983:3. [7] A text is to be seen, then as the physical manifestation of
language - the data the reader works with to construct meaning which consist of actual marks on the page. These
marks include the whole range of graphic features which follow generally agreed conventions and
communicative purpose. While reading, the reader constructs meaning the discourse from the text and a reader
may in all likelihood recover many discourses from a given text.
“Reading is a psycho linguistic guessing game" Goodman, 1967. [8] However, the learner or the reader
uses a particular schema. Schemas or schematas are cognitive constructs which allow for the organization of
information in long term memory Widdowson, 1983. [11] The mind, simulated by key words or phrases in the
text or by the text, activates knowledge schema. The cognitive characteristics of schemas allow us to relate
incoming information to already known information. The schemas may be changing with the genre of the text
and topic of the text. The reader thus needs to bring together knowledge, the knowledge of how texts are
constructed and familiarity with the discourses within a text besides the cultural context it is set in, for, reading
comprehension is function of cultural knowledge.

Reading and Literature reading

Though literature does not constitute a particular type of language in itself, it may reveal a higher
incidence of certain kinds of linguistic features which are tightly patterned in the text. These features may
include metaphor, simile, assonance repetition of vowel sounds, alliteration repetition of consonant sounds,
repetition of a word or phrase, unusual syntactic pattern Ten thousand saw l at a glance, double or multiple
meaning of a word, poetic lines and mixing of styles and registers. e.g.

1. Three grey Geese in a field grazing grey were the Geese and green was the grazing
2. She's been working on the project all week but she's starting to run out of steam. She doesn't feel that her
mind is spending any more Lazar, 1993. [6]

Also the meaning of a literary text can never be fixed. Individual readers make sense of texts in very different
ways, depending on the society they live in and their personal psychology.
Reading literature in English does encourage students to acquire language. "The study of literature
makes literature itself the content or subject of a language course while the mi of literature as a resource draws
on literature as one source among many different kinds of texts for promoting interesting language activities."
Then if our aim is the study of literature, developing „the literary competence‟ of our students is a must. If we
wish to use literature as resource, then our aim may not be to teach literary competence but it is possible that our
students will begin to acquire it through their exposure to literary texts.

Reading and literary competence:

Effective readers of a literary text possess „literary competence‟ Culler, '1975 [5] .They have an
implicit understanding of and familiarity with certain conventions, which allow them to take the words and
convert them into literary in earning. For example, when competent readers are given a novel or a play, they will
be using certain literary conventions to follow the plot and recognize certain themes. The term literary
competence is not easy to be defined. However it can be said of literary competence that it includes the
knowledge of the tradition, attitude to the world of literature, skills in criticism of literature and the ability to
respond to creative both literary and non-literary works.

Corresponding Author: Diwakar Prahaladaiah 9 | Page

 A Study on Developing Reading, Literary Competence and The Communicative Approach

Jane Spiro, 1991, offering a model of literary competence, observes that Literary Competence includes the
following:
 understanding plain sense of the text
 understanding context
 learning to empathize
 learning to be creative
 learning to appreciate
 learning the critical framework

Literary competence thus is said to involve the ability to respond and also the ability to account for that
response.
During the process of acquiring Literary Competence the reader is said to be interacting with the text
not only for meaning and responding to the text but also for finding clues and means to account for that
response. Also in the process the reader does acquire a great deal of new language. Thus the reading of literature
at all levels becomes an additional source of language input besides the restricted input that the learner has in the
classroom. It can be looked at as supplementing the available input for enhancing language acquisition.
Developing the Literary Competence of the learner, then requires the teacher to provide opportunities for them
to interact with the text, extract the meaning and react to the meaning extracted. What is more important in these
three 'Acts„ is the skill to extract the meaning(s) conveyed by the text. Besides acquiring what are called text
attack skills the reader then will have to be exposed to “meaning extracting strategies“ by the teacher of
language / literature in the classroom. „Tasks‟ or problem solving activities can be thought of developing the
same. For example, let us consider the two lines from a poem by Thomas Hood; Past and Present.

My brother planted a tree on his birthday. The tree is living yet

 Questioning and eliciting answers (questions of all types such as inferential and evaluative ones)
 Helping the learner to relate the same to his/her individual experiences.
 Helping him/her to create an expression of his past and present in writing that includes sophisticated
techniques for recognizing and interpreting the function of the cohesive devices or discourse markers used
and organization of other text discourse features.
We can also think of tasks at all the three stages of reading, namely pre- reading, while reading and post reading
stages.

II. CONCLUSION
To conclude as it is strongly felt that reading promotes language acquisition, ways and techniques must
be designed to promote reading as a skill, a habit and thus enhancing the process of effective language
acquisition, ii) as reading at the secondary and tertiary levels means developing literary competence, tasks that
will facilitate acquiring the literary competence must be thought of. Needless to say that interactive reading
needs to be promoted and hence an argument for task based teaching. The role of the teacher in such situations
will be that of a co- communicator, or a co-participant and a learner trainer. The role of the teacher then will be
to train the learner in learning to read thus enabling him/her to acquire reading strategies. All these suggestions
are made within the framework of CLT which looks at language learning essentially as a process and focuses on
the use of the language productively and receptively, in un-rehearsed contexts.
The researcher is a solo correspondence author, there is no conflict of interest.

REFERENCES
[1]. Alderson. C and A Utquart (eds) Reading in a Foreign Language, London, Longman, 1984, p. 159 79
[2]. Brumfit. C. J. (ed) Teaching Literature Overseas, Language based Approaches, Penguin, Orford, Penguin, 1983
[3]. Carell. P. Second Language reading ability or language proficiency Applied Linguistics 12/2, 1991, p. 159 79
[4]. Carter. R and Long. M.M (1991), Teaching Literature Hongkong Longman;
[5]. Culler. J, Structural Poetics, London, Rontledge, 1975
[6]. Lazar, Gillian, Literature and Language Teaching a guide for teachers and trainers, Cambridge, CUP, 1993
[7]. Prabhu N.S, Second Language Pedagogy, OUP, Oxford, 1980
[8]. Smith. F, Understanding Reading Oxford, Holi, Reinhard, 1971
[9]. Wallace Learning to Read in Multicultural Society New York Prentice Hall, 1983
[10]. Wallace, Katherene Reading, Oxford, OUP, 1992
[11]. Widdowson. H.G. Teaching Language as Communication, Oxford, OUP, 1975

Diwakar Prahaladaiah"A Study on Developing Reading, Literary Competence and the

Communicative Approach " (Quest Journals) Journal of Research in Humanities and Social
Science 6.12 (2018):08-10

Corresponding Author: Diwakar Prahaladaiah 10 | Page