Communicative Competence

Communicative Competence

• mid-60s Chomsky drew a distinction between competence and performance

• wanted to explain how children could acquire competence (rule-governed creativity) despite parents’ performance errors and problems

• But Chomsky put too much emphasis on syntax

Communicative vs. Linguistic Competence

• “Communicative competence” invented by Dell Hymes, a sociolinguist, to cover social and functional aspects of language

• Based on the functions as well as the structure of language

• Interpersonal as well as intrapersonal

Aspects of Communicative Competence (Canale & Swain)

Grammatical competence – morphology, syntax, semantics, lexis, phonology – even this is broader than Chomskyan syntax – e.g. it would reject “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”-- subtle semantic differences, “my lust for the Polish people”, may be disastrous or amusing, “ send me to the station”

Discourse Competence

• Discourse – language bigger than a sentence• Transfer often a problem especially in

writing – “they” used without a preceding noun

• Academic prose is very conventional – hedges are common in English scientific writing but boosters infrequent

• Turn-taking and silence rules

Sociolinguistic Competence

• A knowledge of sociolinguistic rules

• Levels of formality

• Gender-specific pronouns

• Taboo words and euphemisms

• Race-specific titles

• terms of endearment “darling, love, duck”

Strategic Competence

• What you do when you don’t what to say.

• Strategies used to compensate for lack of competence or performance errors

• May be nonlinguistic

• Paraphrase, avoidance, gestures, appeal for help etc..

Bachman’s Classification

• Language CompetenceGrammatical competence Textual Competence (Discourse) – cohesion

and rhetorical organization• Pragmatic Competence Illocutionary Competence (ideational,

manipulative, heuristic, imaginative functions

Continued

• Sociolinguistic competence (variety, register, culture, metaphor)

• Strategic competence not considered as part of language competence

Language Functions

• Language may perform several functions

• Illocutionary competence is the ability to recognize, realize and respond to these functions

• Instrumental – to makes things happen “go away!”

• Regulatory – something happens when something is said “I name this ship… I now pronounce you… I sentence you to…”

Continued

• Representational – to give information, whether true or untrue

• Interactional – to maintain social relationships

• Personal – to express emotions• Heuristic – to acquire information• Imaginary – to create world that have a

mental reality

Failures of Communicative competence

Pragmatic or sociolinguistic failure

• Response to compliments

• Expressions of gratitude (intensity and occasion)

• Directness of requests

• Duplication of politeness markers

• Intensification of apologies

Stages in Pragmatic Competence

1. Message-orientated and unsystematic – context, simplification, formulae

2. Interlanguage-orientated and potentially systematic– sociolinguistic features, variety of strategies, pragmatic transfer

3. Interculturally-orientated and potentially systematic – approximates native speaker competence, residual transfer such as sensitivity to status

Teaching Communicative Competence

• Development of functional syllabuses• Based on language functions rather than

structure• Advocated by Council of Europe• But violated natural order• Not always contextualised• Return to structural syllabuses with parallel

teaching of functions

Testing Communicative Competence

Communicative approach -- Widdowson 1978

existing tests criticised -- claimed that language was interaction-based, unpredictable,contextual [situation, textual], purposeful, performance- based, authentic [i.e. not simplified], behaviour-based [test success should be measured by outcomes]

Continued

Communicative language tests

• should be criterion-referenced -- performance of specified tasks

• should be authentic -- involve real activities, e.g. listening to radio news or lecture

• assessment is holistic [subjective?]

• direct tests