• Author / Uploaded
• Nicolae Bolovan

Citation preview

Being competent means to be able to do something successfully or efficiently like actors when they make us believe the role they are playing and forget the person behind or painters, composers, and dancers when they introduce us to new forms of beauty. But, when could we say a speaker is competent? The aim of the chosen topic number 4 “Communicative competence: Analysis of its components” is to offer a broad account of the concept of communicative competence and this presentation will start by offering the most relevant definitions of the concept with emphasis on the terms competence, ability and performance. Then, models of communicative competence will be presented analyzing their components with special attention to the most relevant and current one proposed by the Common European Framework of Reference. Finally, a conclusion will be offered and bibliographical notes will be presented. Communicative Competence Overview The term communicative competence is comprised of two words, the combination of which means “competence to communicate”. Competence is one of the most controversial terms in the field of general and applied linguistics. Its introduction to linguistic discourse has been generally associated with Chomsky who, in his very influential book “Aspects of the Theory of Syntax”, drew what has been today viewed as a classic distinction between competence (the monolingual speaker-listener’s knowledge of language) and performance (the actual use of language in real situations). He describes ‘competence’ as an idealized capacity that is located as a psychological or mental property or function and ‘performance’ as the production of

1

actual utterances. In short, competence involves “knowing” the language and performance involves “doing” something with language. Soon after Chomsky, the linguist Hymes (1972) defined communicative competence not only as an inherent grammatical competence but also as the ability to use grammatical competence in a variety of communicative situations. It is competence of language use appropriate to the other participants of the communicative interaction and appropriate to the given social context and situation. Later on, Canale and Swain (1980) and understood communicative competence as a synthesis of an underlying system of knowledge and skill needed for communication. In their concept of communicative competence, knowledge refers to the conscious or unconscious knowledge of an individual about language and about other aspects of language use. According to them, there are three types of knowledge: knowledge of underlying grammatical principles, knowledge of how to use language in a social context in order to fulfill communicative functions and knowledge of how to combine utterances and communicative functions with respect to discourse principles. In addition, their concept of skill refers to how an individual can use the knowledge in actual communication. According to Canale (1983), skill requires a further distinction between underlying capacity and its manifestation in real communication, that is to say, in performance. According to many other theoreticians, Bachman and Palmer, 1996 for example, affirmed that the nature of communicative competence is not static but dynamic; it is more interpersonal than intrapersonal and relative rather than absolute. It is also largely defined by context. In this respect Bachman (1990) suggested using the term

2

«communicative language ability», claiming that this term combines in itself the meanings of both language proficiency and communicative competence.

Models of the communicative competence Recent theoretical and empirical research on communicative competence is largely based on three models of communicative competence: the model of Canale and Swain, the model of Bachman and Palmer and the description of components of communicative language competence in the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR further use in this presentation). 1. The theoretical model which was proposed by Canale and Swain (1980, 1981) had at first three main components on the fields of knowledge and skills: grammatical, sociolinguistic and strategic competence. In a later version of this model, Canale (1983, 1984) transferred some elements from sociolinguistic competence into the fourth component which he named discourse competence. According to Canale and Swain, grammatical competence is concerned with mastery of the linguistic code (verbal or non-verbal) which includes vocabulary knowledge as well as knowledge of morphological, syntactic, semantic, phonetic and orthographic rules. This competence enables the speaker to use knowledge and skills needed for understanding and expressing the literal meaning of utterances. Canale (1983, 1984) described discourse competence as mastery of rules that determine ways in which forms and meanings are combined to achieve cohesion by the use of devices (e.g. pronouns, conjunctions, synonyms, parallel structures etc.) which help to link individual sentences and utterances to a structural whole. The means for achieving coherence, for instance repetition, progression, 3

consistency, relevance of ideas etc., enable the organisation of meaning establishing a logical relationship between groups of utterances. Strategic competence is composed of knowledge of verbal and non-verbal communication strategies that are recalled to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to insufficient competence in one or more components of communicative

competence.

These

strategies

include

paraphrase,

circumlocution, repetition, reluctance, avoidance of words, structures or themes, guessing, changes of register and style, modifications of messages etc. The sociolinguistic competence in their model includes knowledge of rules and conventions which underlie the appropriate comprehension and language use in different sociolinguistic and sociocultural contexts. 2. According to Bachman and Palmer (1996), many traits of language users such as some general characteristics, their topical knowledge, affective scheme and language ability influence the communicative language ability. The crucial characteristic is their language ability which is comprised of two broad areas – language knowledge and strategic competence. Language knowledge consists of two main components – organizational knowledge and pragmatic knowledge which complement each other in achieving communicatively effective language use. In Bachman and Palmer’s model, organisational knowledge is composed of abilities engaged in a control over formal language structures, of grammatical and textual knowledge. Grammatical knowledge includes several rather independent areas of knowledge such as knowledge of vocabulary, morphology, syntax, phonology, and graphology. They enable recognition and production of grammatically correct sentences as well as comprehension of their propositional content. Textual knowledge enables 4

comprehension and production of spoken or written texts. It covers the knowledge of conventions for combining sentences or utterances into texts, cohesion, and knowledge of rhetorical organisation (way of developing narrative texts, descriptions, comparisons, classifications etc.) or conversational organization (conventions for initiating, maintaining and closing conversations). Pragmatic knowledge in their model refers to abilities for creating and interpreting discourse. It includes two areas of knowledge: knowledge of pragmatic conventions for expressing acceptable language functions and for interpreting the illocutionary power of utterances or discourse (functional knowledge) and knowledge of sociolinguistic conventions for creating and interpreting language utterances which are appropriate in a particular context of language use (sociolinguistic knowledge). Strategic knowledge is conceived in the model as a set of metacognitive components which enable language user involvement in goal setting, assessment of communicative sources, and planning. 3. The last model I will refer to is the model of description of communicative language competence in CEFR (2001), the model which is intended for assessment as well as for learning and teaching of languages. In the CEFR, communicative competence is conceived only in terms of knowledge. It includes three basic components – linguistic competence, sociolinguistic competence and pragmatic competence. Thus, strategic competence is not its componential part. It is interesting, however, that each component of language knowledge is explicitly defined as knowledge of its contents and ability to apply it. a) Linguistic competence is defined as knowledge of, and ability to use, the formal resources from which well-formed, meaningful messages may be assembled and 5

formulated. Its subcomponents are lexical, grammatical, semantic, phonological, orthographic and orthoepic competences.  Lexical Competence can be described as the knowledge of and ability to recognize and use the vocabulary of a language in the way the native speakers use them. This includes: fixed expressions (greetings, proverbs), phrasal idioms, phrasal verbs, compound prepositions, intensifiers or frozen metaphors. Besides, it also includes single words forms or grammatical elements such as articles and personal pronouns. 

Grammatical competence is the ability to recognize and produce the distinctive grammar rules which consists basically of knowledge of elements such as morpheme-roots and affixes, categories such as number, case gender; classes as conjugations or declinations, structures as compound and complex words; processes such as gradation or nominalization or sciences such as morphology and word formation.



Semantic competence can be defined as the learner´s awareness and control of the organization of meaning.



Phonological competence consists of a knowledge of and skill in the perception and production of phonemes in their linguistic environment, word stress, sentence stress, pitch and intonation.



Orthographic competence involves a knowledge of and skill in perception of the symbols of which written texts are composed such as form of letters in printed forms, proper spelling or punctuation marks..



Orthoepic competence has to do with the way reading aloud is produced because it is needed to pronounce written texts in a proper way. This fact 6

may involve: knowledge of spelling spelling conventions or ability to resolve ambiguity when facing ambiguity or syntactic ambiguities. b) Sociolinguistic competence is the knowledge of sociocultural rules knowing how to use and respond to language appropriately. The appropriateness depends on the setting of the communication, the topic, register, and the relationships among the people communicating. Moreover, being appropriate depends on knowing what the taboos of the other culture are, what politeness indices are used in each case, what the politically correct term would be for something, how a specific attitude (authority, friendliness, courtesy, irony etc.) is expressed. So, according to CEFR´s model sociolinguistic competence deals with: linguistic markers of social relations; politeness conventions; expressions of folk-wisdom; register differences; and dialect and accent. c) The last component in this model - pragmatic competence – could be classified into two categories: discourse competence and functional competence. Discourse competence is the speaker´s ability to organize, structure and arrange sentences in sequence so as to produce coherent chunks of meaningful language. It includes knowledge of, and ability to, control the ordering sentences in terms of its topic or focus, the given or new information; the cause effect and so on and so forth. A key concept related to discourse competence is the so called ‘co-operative principle’ (Grice 1975), which states that competent speakers make their contributions when they are required and at the stage at which they occur, by the accepted purpose of the conversational exchange by observing the following maxims: quality (try to make your contribution one that is true), quantity (make your

7

contribution as informative as necessary, but not more), relevance (do not say what is not relevant) and manner (be brief and orderly, avoid obscurity and ambiguity). Functional competence used to perform communicative functions is concerned with the use of spoken discourse and written texts in communication for particular functional purposes. A competent speaker should know how to manage the act of communication in which each initiative leads to a response from the beginning of the interaction to its end. Now, at the end of my presentation, let me summing up the main points I covered. Firstly, I defined the concept of the “communicative competence” and furthermore I developed the three models of communicative competence and analyzed their components mentioning some of the well-known researchers on the field of linguistics, emphasizing their contributions. This theme emerges upon the basis that language and communication are at the heart of the human experience, and therefore the main aim is to know how to teach our students in order to achieve to communicate effectively in a pluralistic society focusing on the sociolinguistic and cultural aspects of language. Several valuable sources have contributed to the realization of this presentation as follow: Bachman, L.F. (1990). Fundamental Considerations in Language Testing. Oxford etc.: OUP. Canale, M. (1983). From communicative competence to communicative language pedagogy. Canale, M., & Swain, M. (1981). A Theoretical Framework for Communicative Competence. In Palmer, A., Groot, P., & Trosper, G. 8

(Eds.), The construct validation of test of communicative competence, 31-36. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Council of Europe (2001). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching and Assessment. Strasbourg. Hymes, D. H. (1972). On Communicative Competence. In Pride, J. B., & Holmes, J. (Eds.), Sociolinguistics, 269-293. Baltimore, USA: Penguin Education, Penguin Books Ltd.

9