COMMUNICATIVE

COMPETENCE

Objectives:
Enable to determine the meaning of
communicative competence
The four competence areas.

Communicative Competence
is a term in linguistics which refers to a
language user's grammatical knowledge
of syntax, morphology, phonology and
the like, as well as social knowledge
about how and when to use utterances
appropriately.

Chomskys
distinction
between
competence and performace
Competence
shared knowledge of
ideal speaker-listener set in a completely
homogenous speech community.

 Performance: process of applying

underlying knowledge to actual language
use.

ORIGINS
Hymes
Chomskyview too narrow to describe language
behavior as a whole.
Hymes concludes that a linguistic theory must be able to
deal with a heterogeneous speech community, differential
competence and the role of sociocultural features
Performance he defines it as the actual use of language in
a concrete situation, not an idealized speaker-listener
situation in a completely homogeneous speech community

ORIGINS
Hymes
two kinds of competence: linguistic
competence, and the communicative competence
Linguistic competence that deals with producing and
understanding grammatically correct sentences
Communicative competence that deals with producing
and understanding sentences that are appropriate and
acceptable to a particular situation.

ORIGINS
Hymes coins a term communicative
competence and defines it as a
knowledge of the rules for understanding
and producing both the referential and
social meaning of language.

 Widdowson knowing a language is more

than how to understand, speak, read,and write
sentences, and how sentences are used to
communicate.
communicative abilities have to be developed
at the same time as the linguistic skills;
otherwise the mere acquisition of the linguistic
skills may inhibit the development of
communicative abilities.

 (Canale & Swain, 1980) They strongly believe

that the study of grammatical competence is as
essential to the study of communicative
competence as is the study of sociolinguistic
competence.
They propose their own theory of
communicative competence that minimally
includes three main competencies: grammatical,
sociolinguistic and strategic competence.

ORIGINS
Grammatical competence includes knowledge
of lexical items and of rules of
morphology,syntax,sentencegrammar
semantics, and phonology.
Sociolinguistic competence is made up of two
sets of rules: sociolinguistic rules of use and
rules of discourse. They believe that
knowledge of these rules will be crucial in
interpreting utterances for social meaning

ORIGINS
Strategic competence is made up of
verbal and non-verbal communication
strategies that may be called into action
to compensate for breakdowns in
communication due to performance
variables or to insufficient grammatical
competence

BACHMANS VIEW
The organizational competence is divided into grammatical
competence and textual competence.
Bachmans grammatical competence is consonant with Canale
and Swains grammatical competence.
The
textual competence, pertains to the knowledge of
conventions for cohesion and coherence and rehetorical
organization. It also includes conventions for language use in
conversations, involving starting, maintaining, and closing
conversations.
Bachmans textual competence have both the part of Canale and
Swains discourse competence and
the part of their strategic competence.

COMMUNICATIVE
COMPETENCE THEN
Communicative competence is made up of four
competence areas: linguistic, sociolinguistic,
discourse, and strategic.
Linguistic competence is knowing how to use
the grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of a
language.

COMMUNICATIVE
COMPETENCE THEN
Sociolinguistic competence is knowing how
to use and respond to language appropriately,
given the setting, the topic, and the
relationships among the people
communicating.

COMMUNICATIVE
COMPETENCE THEN
Discourse competence is knowing how
to interpret the larger context and how to
construct longer stretches of language so
that the parts make up a coherent whole.

COMMUNICATIVE
COMPETENCE THEN
Strategic competence is knowing how
to recognize and repair communication
breakdowns, how to work around gaps in
ones knowledge of the language, and
how to learn more about the language
and in the context.

 Probably the most difficult competence to acquire is

sociolinguistic. This is concerned with choosing the
right words for the situation. It is sociolinguistic
competence which differentiates between a good
speaker and a native-like speaker. This aspect often
differs greatly from culture to culture and errors can
often make a speaker sound rude, arrogant or just
strange.

So what is
sociolinguistic
competence?
Holmes : the knowledge which underlies peoples

ability to use language appropriately. and further how

to use language for different functions []. Learning to
speak appropriately in a range of contexts is important
if one wants to avoid giving offence, reducing everyone
to hysterical laughter, or embarrassing others by a
sociolinguistic faux pas.

 Bayley and Regan: knowledge of

variation is part of speaker competence.
[] in order to become fully proficient in
the target language learners need to
acquire native speaker patterns of
variation.

 Regionally / socially / culturally accepted language

abilityFeatures of sociolinguistic competence:
1. Dialect: regional OR social differences in Dialect
language. (For example, RP is social and not
regional).
2. Register: considering ones audience AND social
Register context

 3. Naturalness: staying in the bounds of

what is Naturalness "common" usage of
the language.
4. Cultural Aspects: adhering to cultural
Aspects expectations when using the
language, including figures of speech,
proper time and place, etc.

Sociolinguistic competence is evident in

many aspects of language:

Phonology
Grammar
Lexical
Pragmatics

 Phonology -> From a phonological point of

view, the most studied point has been /in/ and
/ig/ as in Im goin to the cinema and Im
going to the cinema
Other points include:
Do you like ice-cream?
/dju/ like ice-cream? In an Irish context:/d/, /t/
and // //

 Grammar
I did my homework / *I done my
homework
I should have gone there / *I should
have went there
Ill take those books / *Ill take them
books

Lexical
Including:
informal/formal (e.g. pop in/visit)
Dialect (e.g. cops/police/guards)

 Pragmatics speech acts such as greeting,

requesting, advising, suggesting, complaining
etc. This is the area where non-native speakers
can have serious problems.