The Communicative Approach Applied to ESP: Focus on the Pragmatic Competence for Specific Purposes in the Moroccan Tourism Context

The Communicative Approach as an FLT model stresses that the use of language among people is communication-oriented. This means that when people engage in social  interactions that need language use, they speak to perform some language communicative acts and functions. (Austin, 1962) and (Searle, 1979) termed them as speech acts. We can notify some Speech Acts like promising, warning, pledging and others as examples. From this functional perspective, language is perceived as a doing force that effectively leads to the performance of Speech Acts. So, when we speak, we carry out communicative functions, we argue, we persuade or advise the hearer. Another fundamental aim of the application of the Communicative Approach to FLT in general and ESP in particular is to provide students with communicative competences which would enable them to perform language successfully in communicative situations. The communicative competence as a term pertaining to the domain of language and sign use was constructed and introduced to the field by Dell Hymes (1967-1972). This eminent sociolinguist perceived Chomsky’s notion on language competence to be too limited. From this regard, communicative competence  makes it possible to rightly understand and interpret the intended meaning within specific contextual layers, whether on the sentence sphere or above the sentence stratum that reaches upon the interpersonal and situational contexts.