Abstract:
English language communication is crucial to develop the community’s
interest in learning English as a second language especially in achieving the
target of Vision 2020 of being fully developed country based on our own
moulding and in producing quality human capital as the main manpower.
Thus, various methods and approaches have been implemented to teach the
language effectively. One of the approaches is Communicative Approach
which is based on the idea that learning language successfully comes
through having to communicate real meaning. When learners are involved in
real communication, their natural strategies for language acquisition will be
used, and this will allow them to learn to use the language. The aim of
communicative approach is communicative competence. Therefore, this
study is carried out due to the problems faced by the teacher trainees who
are still lacking of communicative competence although they have learnt
English for at least 11 years in schools and scored good marks in their Sijil
Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) examination. Thus, it intends to identify the effects
of practicing the communicative approach in the teaching of speaking skill
among ESL teacher trainees, the effect of motivation factor, the effect of
English practices in the classroom and the effect of language learning
strategies on speaking performance. The quasi-experimental design is to
analyse the students’ speaking performance through the use of the speaking
module, ‘Diagnose, Run and Assess’ (DRA) based on Communicative
Approach (CA) principles.
