Communicative Language Tasks to Enhance Young Learners’ Communicative Competence

The Malaysian curriculum reform in 2011 for English as a Second Language (ESL) was designed with the intent to set a national curriculum system that is on par with international standards by adopting CEFR into the ESL classroom. However, challenges arose when rural primary school learners were found to have lower proficiency level. Therefore, this study investigated the impact of communicative language tasks on rural primary school learners' communicative competence in Julau, Sarawak, Malaysia. This study also explored the learners' perspective towards the communicative language tasks in developing their communicative competence. Informed by the qualitative approach of data collection, this study employed pre-test, post-test and individual interviews with ten research participants selected through purposive sampling. Findings from this study disclosed that the CEFRaligned communicative language tasks enhanced the learners' grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic communicative competence. The findings also revealed that the learners have developed intrinsic motivation and interest to learn English using the communicative language tasks.