When children begin formal schooling, their fundamental communication skills, speaking and listening, are well developed but limited in scope and range; it becomes the teacher's task to assist the children in achieving communicative competence. A developmental project called "Developing Communicative Competence in Children" identifies four…

Most instructional materials developed in the past 10-15 years do not provide for sufficient activities to allow the student to become involved in anything other than drill and memorization. Furthermore, in those situations where "communication activities" do occur, they are designed to teach the sentence as a structural, grammatical…