Indicators of english communicative competence for efl learners in Taiwan—A fuzzy delphi method

This study is designed to establish an indicator of English communicative competence for high school students whose L1 is Chinese. Fuzzy Delphi Method is the primary methodology employed by this research. Twenty experts were invited as the participants. Delphi Method has been considered a powerful approach to apprehend experts’ collective opinions on the targeted issues. In this study, the Fuzzy Linguistic Scale replaced the traditional Likert scale for its subjectivity related to human beings’ decision-making. In terms of the instrumentation, indicators were constructed utilizing Bachman’s Model of Communicative Language Ability (CLA). In this study, two rounds of Delphi were administered and experts’ opinions were converged with some questions being deleted from the model. Results of this study indicate that vocabulary is considered as the most important part for EFL learners of Chinese to improve their communicative competence in English followed by the ability to interpret the contents and context of conversation.