Linguistic competence in the C L T context of Senegal and issues

Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) was materialized in the West in the 1960s and has extended to the Eastern countries over the last 20 years. Since then, CLT principles have formed the foundation of English language syllabi for countries such as Senegal. In Senegal, CLT was adopted as early in the 1990s. Before CLT was introduced, the structural syllabus was the mainstream approach in most countries settings including Senegal. Yalden (1987:61) summarized the essence of CLT thus:

           It is based on the notion of the learners as communicators, naturally endowed with the ability to learn languages. It seeks to provide learners with the target language system. It is assumed that learners will have to prepare to use the target language (orally and in written form) in many predictable and unpredictable acts of communication which arise both in classroom interaction and in real-world situations, whether concurrent with language training or subsequent to it.

Unfortunately, in Senegal ,linguistic competence or its components is still being taught by using the old methods .teachers generally think that teaching grammar ,syntax or lexis is giving the students lists of rules and sentences with abstract terminologies for them to learn them by heart. That is why, Language exploitation may not offer a real reflection of the learner’s underlying knowledge of the language. What makes it more difficult or unrealistic is, also that in most case, teachers teach grammar as explicit as possible and treat it in separate course when it should have been embedded into a general language course and especially into meaningful context. Language is context dependant. Without the context language would simply be spoken in a vacuum.

There are many problems in developing language proficiency as we just saw ,as we know most English teachers had not been trained up to this method of CLT or they found it very difficult to implement and in our national   syllabus(enseignement moyen et secondaire ,programmes de L.V. ANGLAIS,3em edition revue et corrigée b.a ,fevrier 2003https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzoEemyoa6HCV01BdEk3OVFfeE0/edit?usp=sharing) it is mentioned that :the English secondary school curriculum subscribes to the communicative language teaching approach .

The communicative method is not very easy to implement because it demands lot of sacrifices in terms of time consuming and lack of material for both teachers and learners, but language is not easy to teach and being in an E .F. L context does not make it easy because teachers must be very skillful and show abnegation.