شبكة المعلومات العربية التربوية

Efficient skill of communication has become a passport to success during these last decades. People are judged according to how well they master the skills of communication in various aspects of their lives: professional, social, and private. Many competencies are measured according to our ability to express ourselves in a clear and convincing and why not elegant way. People have never communicated so much and in so diverse mediums as they do today. The tremendous advances in technology have undoubtedly influenced the nature of communication in this modern life, thus giving it new dimensions: today, the individual can communicate simultaneously with different interlocutors who are at opposite poles of the globe (such as in video conferences). He can transmit and receive messages almost instantly from partners who are at huge geographical distances from where he is via electronic mail, phone, and voice messages. It has even been made possible today to communicate with interlocutors in a ‘virtual’ relationship. In such a world, communicating in one’s native tongue only has almost come to be considered as a handicap, and learning at least one foreign language has become a must. Yet, learning a foreign language is often equated with learning to speak this language. Oral communication in today’s world gained more importance and this is why a major mission of successful foreign language teaching institutions is to offer a pedagogy centred around “helping the learner attain as advanced communication skills” as possible. The ultimate objective of an efficient educational programme is to send back his learners with enough skills to manage oral communication fluently in the language they have chosen to learn, this is the central motivation and concern of the present work. In fact, this research grew out of the author’s awareness of the distress so many FL learners are made to go through when they find themselves in real target communication situations. Although most of them can read and write this language with some ease, they often find it more demanding to express themselves orally, their outcome remains to a large extent inappropriate and hesitant. Because there is often at least one explanation to the failure of any pedagogical experience, the present work attempts to explain the reason(s) behind this state of affairs in DLU English department. It then offers a view which might make our students succeed, at least partially thanks to their efficient communication skills; in their future professional as well as personal lives not only as foreign language learners, but also as ordinary citizens. This is, we believe, what one of the noble missions the university ought to have. (Author’s abstract)