David Navarro Sarabia Secondary English Unit 4 Updated Edition EPO
UNIT 4
COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE.
ANALYSIS OF ITS COMPONENTS.
By David Navarro Sarabia
David Navarro Sarabia Secondary English Unit 4 Updated Edition EPO
OUTLINE
1. INTRODUCTION.
2. THE COMMUNICATION PROCESS
3. COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE. ANALYSIS OF ITS COMPONENTS
4. PEDAGOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS.
5. CONCLUSION.
6. BIBLIOGRAPHY.
David Navarro Sarabia Secondary English Unit 4 Updated Edition EPO
1. INTRODUCTION.
The present unit deals with Communicative Competence, that is, a person’s
unconscious knowledge of the rules governing the appropriate use of the language in social
situations. It is usually contrasted with Linguistic Competence, the person’s unconscious
knowledge of the formal patterning of language. Communicative Competence includes our
formal patterning of language. Communicative Competence includes our awareness of the
factors which govern acceptable speech, such as how to begin and end conversations, how
to interrupt, how to address people, and how to behave in special speech situations (e. g.
apologising, thanking, and expressing formality or informality).
Mastering a language means to have acquired a level of Communicative
Competence. A distinction has to be made between that which a speaker of a language
knows implicitly (competence), and how he actually speaks the language (performance).
Dell Hymes believed that competence alone was not enough to explain a native
speaker's knowledge, as a native cannot only use grammatically correct forms, but also
knows when and where to use them.
The notion of competence emerged in the 1960s as a tenet of Chomskyan
linguistics. It has since led to the development of several related terms, notably Pragmatic
or Communicative competence, referring to the ability to produce and understand
sentences appropriate to the social context in which they occur.
During the past 25 years or so, communicative language teaching has been the
dominant approach to the teaching of foreign and second languages. Much of this
ascendancy is due to the sociolinguist Dell Hymes (1967) who in a series of articles
developed the notion of Communicative Competence. Hymes was convinced that
Chomsky’s (1965) notion of competence defined as a speaker-hearer’s underlying mental
representation of grammatical rules was far too narrow. Instead communicative
competence takes us one step further than purely grammatical competence, into the area
of pragmatics which deals with the use of language in everyday communicative situations.
CC is therefore concerned not only with what is grammatical but also what is appropriate
in a given social situation.
Working along similar lines, Cummins (1979, 1980) suggested that there should be a
distinction made between cognitive/academic language proficiency (CALP) and basic
interpersonal communicative skills (BICS). CALP refers to the aspect of proficiency in
which the learner reflects on the surface features of the language outside of the immediate
situational or interpersonal context. This is the aspect of proficiency which learners might
use in doing classroom grammar exercises which focus on grammatical form. In contrast to
David Navarro Sarabia Secondary English Unit 4 Updated Edition EPO
this, BICS is the communicative capacity which all children must acquire in order to be able
to function in everyday interpersonal messages.
The most important study on developing the notion of Communicative Competence
from Dell Hymes work has been done by Canale and Swain (1980). There is also a useful
discussion of this in Swain (1980) which is especially useful for those approaching
communicative competence from a second language acquisition point of view.
Canale and Swain (1980) defined Communicative Competence in terms of three
components:
1. Grammatical Competence: words and rules
2. Sociolinguistic Competence: appropriateness
3. Strategic Competence: appropriate use of communication strategies
Canale (1983) refined the above model, adding discourse competence: cohesion and
coherence
A more recent survey of communicative competence by Bachman (1990) divides it
into the broad headings of "organizational competence," which includes both grammatical
and discourse (or textual) competence, and "pragmatic competence," which includes both
sociolinguistic and "illocutionary" competence. Strategic Competence is associated with the
interlocutors' ability in using communication strategies (Faerch & Kasper, 1983; Lin, 2009).
Through the influence of communicative language teaching, it has become widely
accepted that communicative competence should be the goal of language education, central
to good classroom practice. This is in contrast to previous views in which grammatical
competence was commonly given top priority. The understanding of communicative
competence has been influenced by the field of pragmatics and the philosophy of language
concerning speech acts as described in large part by John Searle and J.L. Austin.
Communicative Competence has always been present in the Spanish current
legislation ever since LOGSE appeared in 1990. Great emphasis in made on the learner’s
achievement of all the different communicative competences, also included in the Foreign
Language General Objectives, in the different Content Blocks and in the corresponding
Evaluation Criteria of each level, in the different Autonomous Communities.
At classroom level, the content of this unit connects with the necessary background
the teacher must have to encourage communication in the class. By providing the students
with the necessary support to make them use the language in the appropriate context, so
that the student can distinguish between formal and informal English, and can also be aware
of what sort of functional content to use according to the person he/she is addressing to or
the type of message he/she wants to communicate.
David Navarro Sarabia Secondary English Unit 4 Updated Edition EPO
2. THE COMMUNICATION IN PROCESS
Defining Communication
The word communication is derived from a Latin word meaning “to share.”
Communication can be defined as purposefully and actively exchanging information
between two or more people to convey or receive the intended meanings through a shared
system of signs and (symbols).
The Communication Process
The communication process includes the steps we take in order to ensure we have
succeeded in communicating. The communication process comprises essential and
interconnected elements:
Source: The source comes up with an idea and sends a message in order to share
information with others. The source could be one other person or a group of people.
Message: The message is the information or subject matter the source is intending to share.
The information may be an opinion, feelings, instructions, requests, or suggestions.
Channels: The source may encode information in the form of words, images, sounds, body
language, and more. There are many definitions and categories of communication channels
to describe their role in the communication process, including verbal, non-verbal, written,
and digital.
Receiver: The receiver is the person for whom the message is intended. This person is
charged with decoding the message in an attempt to understand the intentions of the source.
Environment: The environment is the physical and psychological space in which the
communication is happening (Mclean, 2005). It might also describe if the space is formal or
informal.
Context: The context is the setting, scene, and psychological and psychosocial
expectations of the source and the receiver(s) (McLean, 2005). This is strongly linked to
expectations of those who are sending the message and those who are receiving the
message.
Interference: There are many kinds of interference (also called “noise”) that inhibit effective
communication. Interference may include poor audio quality or too much sound, poor image
quality, too much or too little light, attention, etc.
David Navarro Sarabia Secondary English Unit 4 Updated Edition EPO
3. COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE. ANALYSIS OF ITS COMPONENTS.
The notion of Communicative Competence is one of the theories that underlies the
communicative approach to foreign language teaching. Communicative Competence is a
term in linguistics which refers to a language user's grammatical knowledge of syntax,
morphology, phonology, as well as social knowledge about how and when to use utterances
appropriately.
The term was coined by Dell Hymes in 1966, reacting against the perceived
inadequacy of Noam Chomsky's (1965) distinction between Competence and Performance.
To address Chomsky's abstract notion of Competence, Hymes undertook ethnographic
exploration of Communicative Competence that included "communicative form and function
in integral relation to each other". The approach pioneered by Hymes is now known as the
ethnography of communication.
Debate has occurred regarding Linguistic Competence and Communicative
Competence in the second and foreign language teaching literature, and scholars have
found communicative competence as a superior model of language following Hymes'
opposition to Chomsky's Linguistic Competence.
o Historical background.
In the 1950’s Chomsky's came forward with competence-performance distinction.
To Chomsky, competence was the internalised knowledge of the system of syntactic and
phonological rules of the language that the ideal speaker-hearer possesses in the native
language; and performance was language in use by the individual (full of hesitations, false
starts, and convoluted syntax), which was not a faithful reflection of the individual's
competence. Consequently, to Chomsky performance was of little theoretical interest.
Soon the term "Communicative Competence" was coined to cover this extended
notion of competence. In the 60s and 70s, Hymes described communicative competence
as "what speaker needs to know to communicate effectively in culturally significant settings".
According to Hymes, a child learning a language acquires, along with a system of grammar,
"a system of its use, regarding persons, places, purposes, other modes of communication...
patterns of the sequential use of language in conversation, address, standard routines".
Hence, the most important task for sociolinguistic research was the identification of the
"rules, pattern, purposes and consequences of language use" and an account of their
interrelations.
The significance of Hymes' work for non-native language teaching has been in its
profound replacement of formal linguistic knowledge by functional linguistic knowledge, in
David Navarro Sarabia Secondary English Unit 4 Updated Edition EPO
the shift it has caused from knowing how to produce a correct sentence to knowing how to
produce an appropriate, socially acceptable and natural one.
In the 1980s, Canale and Swain (1980), came up with subsequent modifications. They
claimed that there are four major components: Grammatical Competence, Discourse
Competence, Sociolinguistic Competence and Strategic Competence.
o Grammatical Competence.
It involves the "computational aspect of language", the rules or formulations or
constraints that allow us to pair sound with meaning, the rules that form syntactic
constructions of phonological or semantic patterns of varied sorts. However, note that it is
not still clear that any current theory of grammar can be selected over others to characterise.
This competence nor in what ways a theory of grammar is directly relevant for second
language pedagogy.
o Discourse Competence.
This type of competence concerns mastery of how to combine grammatical forms and
meanings to achieve a unified spoken or written text in different genres.
Unity of a text is achieved through cohesion in form and coherence in meaning.
Cohesion deals with how utterances are linked structurally and facilitates interpretation of
a text. Coherence refers to the relationships among the different meanings in a text, where
these meanings may be literal meanings, communicative functions, and attitudes.
There is, of course, a field of discourse analysis whose practitioners view it as a tool
for the exploration of this vast area between knowledge of linguistic structure and knowledge
of culture. So, it could be stated that if "discourse competence" is to be viewed as knowledge
of the structure of text, then it would be more appropriate to view it as part of sociolinguistic
competence.
o Sociolinguistic Competence.
The earlier Canale and Swain (1980) conception of sociolinguistic competence viewed
it as being composed of two sets of rules: sociocultural rules of use, and rules of discourse.
Canale (1983) characterises sociolinguistic knowledge as knowledge of "the extent to
which utterances are produced and understood appropriately in different sociolinguistic
contexts depending on contextual factors such as status of participants, purposes of the
interaction, and norms or conventions of interaction" and discourse knowledge as "mastery
of how to combine grammatical forms and meanings to achieve a unified spoken or written
text in different genres" what is unclear is the conceptual justification for the separation of
discoursal and sociolinguistic knowledge into distinct components. Surely unity of a text
David Navarro Sarabia Secondary English Unit 4 Updated Edition EPO
involves appropriateness and depends on contextual factors such as status of the
participants, purposes of the interaction, and norms or conventions of interaction.
o Strategic Competence.
In Canale 1983, strategic competence composed of "mastery of verbal and non-verbal
communication strategies that may be called into action for two main reasons:
1. to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to limiting conditions in actual
communication (e.g.: momentary inability to recall an idea of grammatical form) or
2. to insufficient competence in one or more of the other areas of communicative
competence and to enhance the effectiveness of communication (e.g.: deliberately slow
and soft speech for rhetorical effect). Of course, such strategies need to be limited to
resolving grammatical problems: actual communication will also require learners to
handle problems of a sociolinguistic nature (e.g.: how to achieve coherence in a text
when unsure of cohesion devices).
In the 1990s, Bachman divided it into the broad headings of Organizational
Competence," which includes both grammatical and discourse (or textual) competence,
and Pragmatic Competence, which includes both sociolinguistic and "illocutionary"
competence. Strategic Competence is associated with the interlocutors' ability in using
communication strategies.
Recently, The European Council established a common reference framework for
the teaching of foreign languages, and claims for a progressive development of
Communicative Competence in a specific language. This competence includes the
following subcompetences:
1. Linguistic Competence: lexical, semantics, morphosyntactic and phonological. It
relates to knowledge as well as to its cognitive organisation.
2. Sociolinguistic Competence: social conventions, communicative intentions,
registers, etc.
3. Pragmatic Competence: language functions, speech acts and conversations,
drawing on the context of situation. It also concerns the mastery of discourse, cohesion
and coherence, the identification of text types and forms. The Strategic Competence
will be included as a subcompetence of this group.
David Navarro Sarabia Secondary English Unit 4 Updated Edition EPO
4. PEDAGOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS.
It is important to be clear about the goals of teaching communicative competence
because the techniques and procedures of teaching competence forms part of
communicative competence, so our students need just as always to acquire a basic
knowledge of linguistic forms. The teaching points here can be broken down to specific
sounds, grammar patterns and vocabulary items in the traditional skills of listening,
speaking, reading and writing.
But learning specific sounds and patterns does not necessarily entail the ability to use
them, and our students need practice in using the linguistic forms for the social purpose of
language. Rivers discusses the need for students to use language for the normal purposes
of language: establishing social relations, seeking and giving information, etc. There is
enough experimental evidence that this is a necessary step in efficient language learning,
and so it must be incorporated in the teaching process as well. You need to be certain that
such interaction activities form part of your curriculum on a frequent and regular basic, in
beginning courses as well as in advanced.
There are two basic classes of communicative interaction activities, depending on the
teaching point, and there is room for both in the curriculum. In one kind of exercises, the
teaching point is simply to get meaning across, to be able to communicate some referential
meaning in the target language. These we have called exercises in communicative
performance, and they are excellent and necessary for developing linguistic competence. In
the other type of exercises the teaching point is getting meaning across in a socially
acceptable way, and typically these exercises contain culturally relevant information, social
interactional rules. Only the latter we have called activities for developing communicative
competence we can point four basic types of activities in various combinations for
developing communicative competence: social formulas and dialogues, community-oriented
tasks, problem-solving, activities, and role-play.
5. CONCLUSION.
Communicative competence is a concept introduced by Dell Hymes and discussed
and redefined by many authors. Hymes original idea was that speakers of a language have
to have more than grammatical competence in order to be able to communicate effectively
in a language; they also need to know how language is used by members of a speech
community to accomplish their purposes.
David Navarro Sarabia Secondary English Unit 4 Updated Edition EPO
The linguistics aspects of communicative competence are those that have to do with
achieving an internalized functional knowledge of the elements and structures of the
language.
Grammatical Competence refers to the knowledge of the rules of a language and the
ability to use them.
Discourse Competence implies the ability to combine form and thought with
coherence.
Sociolinguistic Competence is the ability to use the code appropriately in different
communicative contexts.
Sociocultural Competence is the ability to use the language in accordance with the
rules of the society.
Strategic Competence is the ability to solve problems in communication which arise
because of partial lack of any of the other competences, especially linguistic competence.
We would still have difficulty deciding in many particular instances whether or not a
particular aspect of language was or was not an exemplification of one kind of competence
or another, that is, delimitation would still cause problems. Some of the features chosen to
exemplify one kind of competence, it would be related to another kind of competence.
The brief explanation of framing and symbolising patterns demonstrates the immense
complexity of the communication process and its multiple channels. The patterns involved
here have very diverse functions but the most immediate and relevant ones for the L2
Speaker-actor are:
The establishing and maintaining of interpersonal relations, the provision of feedback,
e.g.: agreement, apathy rejection; the signalling of the nature of a social relationship, e.g.:
as distant, informal or status-full.
As well as these basic indications, interactants also use the patterns to evaluate each
other's personality. Thus, there is a constant monitoring of intended and uncontrolled verbal
and non-verbal signs in order to make sense of what the person means and is.
The L2 speaker actor certainly needs to be sensitised to their cultural and contextual
relativity.
It appears that native speakers are much readier to excuse L2 deviancy in areas of
grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation but when it comes to the deviant handling of framing
and other symbolising patterns, the native often perceives the L2 Speaker-actor as impolite,
uneducated, aggressive, indifferent or uncooperative.
What is ideally required is a degree of mutual tolerance and willingness to make an
effort to understand cross-cultural transactions.
David Navarro Sarabia Secondary English Unit 4 Updated Edition EPO
6. BIBLIOGRAPHY.
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can we explain them?’ in M Velmans (ed.), The science of consciousness, 63-95.
(London: Routledge, 1996).
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Press, 1996).
⎯ Bachman L F, Fundamental considerations in language testing. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990).
⎯ Canale, M. & Swain, M.: "Theoretical Bases of Communicative Approaches to Second
Language Teaching and Testing", Applied linguistics, 1, 1-47, 1980.
⎯ Canale, M.: "From Communicative Competence to Communicative Language
Pedagogy", in J. Richards and R. Schmidt (eds.). Language and Communication. New
York, Longman, 1983.
⎯ Coletes, A.: "Sociolingüística y dialectología inglesas", en V.A., "Plan de Estudios y
Programas de las Asignaturas. Especialidad de Inglés". Murcia. Facultad de Letras,
1984.
⎯ Dam L., Learner autonomy 3: From theory to classroom practice (Dublin: Authentik,
1995).
⎯ Hymes, D.: "On Communicative Competence", J.B. Pride and D. Holmes,
Sociolinguistics, Harnondsworth, Penguin, 1972.
⎯ Little D, ‘Strategic competence considered in relation to strategic control of the language
learning process’ in H Holec, D Little and R Richterich, Strategies in language learning
and use, 11-37 (Strasbourg: Council of Europe, 1996).
⎯ Loveday: "The Sociolinguistics of Learning and Using a Non-native Language", Oxford,
Pergamon Press, 1982.
⎯ Vygotsky L, Thought and language (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986).