Multilingualism and Multiculturalism Impact on Shaping Oral Literacy and Communicative Competence

Abstract

This study was conducted to investigate on how does the multilingual and multicultural factor affect an individual oral literacy by conducting an interview session and correspondingly examine the features of the conversation from the interview session through a conversational analysis method. The purpose of the study is to have a better understanding of the strategies involved during the learning and acquisition process, the peers and surroundings of the participants, the elements of multiculturalism and multilingualism exhibited in the case of study. The studies show a different strategy was adopted in order to achieve the communicative competence as suggested by Canale and Swain (1980). The results shows that the learners achieved the communicative competence by recognizing the specific structure and features of the language (grammatical competence), understanding the historical background of the ethnicity belong to the language (sociolinguistic competence), practicing the languages ( strategic competence) and understanding the language coherent by listening (discourse competence).