Language Teaching through Objectives and Competencies: A Critical Study with Practical Applications

Abstract

This article examines teaching by objectives, focusing on its three domains, or the so-called procedural specific objectives that it seeks to achieve: cognitive, affective, and skill-based objectives. It critically evaluates this approach by highlighting its limitations and its insufficiency for developing grammatical competence. It then demonstrates that competency-based teaching represents a continuation of teaching by objectives, but with a more effective methodology that enables learners to move beyond linguistic competence toward communicative and textual competence. This approach seeks to help learners solve the linguistic problems they encounter both within and beyond the school through training based on comprehensive, purposeful, and project-oriented situations.
The competency-based approach is also examined critically in terms of its theoretical proposals and the difficulties involved in its practical implementation. The article concludes with several findings, the most important of which are that teaching by objectives represents the first generation, whereas competency-based teaching represents the second generation, and that excessive emphasis on performance and on what learners are expected to achieve at the expense of knowledge may cause the competency-based approach to reproduce the limitations of earlier approaches.