Study 13: Grammar Plus Communicative Practice
Savignon, Sandra (1972) linguistic and communicative studied in French language courses.
The students divided into three groups: a communicative group, a culture group and a control group.
Each group had one hour per week of different activities. First, communicative group had to communicate task in an effort to encourage practice in using French in meaningful, creative, and spontaneous ways. Second, culture group had activities, conducted in English, designed to ‘foster an awareness of the French language and culture through films, music and arts’. Last, the control group had an hour in the language laboratory doing grammar and pronunciation drills similar to those they did in their regular class period.
The tests to measure learners’ linguistic and communicative abilities were administered before and after instruction.
The result were no significant differences between groups on the linguistic competence measures. But the communicative group scored significantly higher than the other two groups on the four communicative tests developed for study.
Savignon interpreted those result as a support for the argument that second language programmes that focus only on accuracy and form do not give students sufficient opportunity to develop communication abilities in a second language.