On communicative and linguistic competence

Subject: On communicative and linguistic competence Sat Nov 19, 2011 12:02 am

On communicative and linguistic competence

ABSTRACT

Communicative competence, which is a broad version of language competence, and the Chomskyan view, linguistic competence, are examined in this paper. We will deal with some of the language aspects that are part of the nucleus of communicative competence from different scholars' points of view. Then the paper concludes with the pedagogical implications of the development of the theory of communicative competence.

INTRODUCTION

While there has already been much debate about linguistic competence and communicative competence in the second and foreign language teaching literature, the result has always been the consideration of communicative competence as a superior model of language following Hymes' opposition to Chomsky's linguistic competence. This opposition has been adopted by those who seek new directions toward a communicative era by taking for granted the basic motives and the appropriacy of this opposition behind the development of communicative competence.

Munby, for example, in his development of "Communicative syllabus design" refers to Hymes' effect both on his work and the foreign and second language teaching field:

The upsurge of interest in the content of the language syllabus,
following the concern with communicative competence generated by
Dell Hymes, reflects inter alia a feeling that we ought to know
much more about what it is that should be taught and learned if
a non native is to be communicatively competent in English
(Munby 1978: 1).

Much of Hymes' justification for the development of his theory of communicative competence is based on his criticism of Chomsky's linguistic competence. In other words, communicative competence was developed as a contrast to Chomsky's linguistic competence. So let's begin with linguistic competence.

LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE

Chomsky states that linguistic theory is concerned with an ideal speaker/listener in a completely homogeneous speech community who knows language perfectly and is not affected by factors such as memory limitations or distractions. He specifies his positions about the ideal speaker/listener in a statement that grammatical or linguistic competence is a cognitive state which "encompasses those aspects of form and meaning and their relations, including underlying structures that enter into that relation which are properly assigned to the specific sub-system of the human mind that relates representations of form and meaning." (Chomsky 1980: 24-59).

In a statement about generative grammar, he says it is expressive of principles which determine the intrinsic correlation of sound and meaning in language. It is also a theory of linguistic competence, a speaker's unconscious latent knowledge (Chomsky 1966: 46-47). He adds that serious investigation of generative grammars quickly reveals that rules which determine sentence forms and their interpretations are both intricate and abstract: the structures they manipulate "are related to physical fact only in a remote way by a long chain of interpretive rules." And it is because of the abstractness of linguistic representations that the analytic procedures of modern linguistics--with their reliance on segmentation and classification, as well as, principles of association and generalization in empiricist psychology--must be rejected.

This is, of course, clear rejection by Chomsky of phrase structure grammar and principles of operant conditioning in behaviorist psychology popularized in audio-lingual approaches to target language learning. And it was partially, but significantly in reaction to audiolingualism that communicative language teaching (C.L.T.) arose. The Chomskyan opposition to behaviorism should not, however, be seen as compatible with negative reaction in communicative language teaching circles to audio-lingualism. C.L.T., audio-lingualism, as well as behaviorism, are all experientially based. Chomsky's views of generative grammar, linguistic competence and language teaching are decidedly not. In fact, his general remarks about contemporary language teaching are not complimentary.

While dealing with reasons for distinctions between the difficulty in teaching target language to adults and the ease of childhood language learning, Chomsky (1988: 179-182) made these remarks:

Use your common sense and use your experience and don't
listen too much to the scientists, unless you find that
what they say is really of practical value and of assistance
in understanding the problems you face, as sometimes it truly
is.

He is, however, more explicit when he says, persons involved in a practical activity such as language teaching should not take what are happening in the sciences seriously, because the capacity to carry out practical activities without much conscious awareness of what is being done is usually far more advanced than scientific knowledge.

Ideas in the modern sciences of linguistics and psychology, which are of little practical use to understanding the distinctions, "are totally crazy and they may cause trouble." He adds that modern linguistics has very little to contribute which is of practical value. Language, he says, is not learnt. It grows in the mind. It is thus, wrong to think that language is taught and misleading to think of it as being learnt. (Chomsky 1982: 175-176).

COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE

To get a better picture of communicative competence, let's state some of the prominent and enduring applied linguistic views of communicative competence.

Savignon (1985: 130) views communicative competence as:

... the ability to function in a truly communicative setting
--that is a dynamic exchange in which linguistic competence
must adapt itself to the total information input, both linguistic
and paralinguistic of one or more interlocutors. Communicative
competence includes grammatical competence (sentence level grammar),
socio-linguistic competence (an understanding of the social context
in which language is used), discourse competence (an understanding
of how utterances are strung together to form a meaningful whole),
and strategic competence (a language user's employment of strategies
to make the best use of what s/he knows about how a language works,
in order to interpret, express, and negotiate meaning in a given
context).

According to Canale and Swain, communicative competence is composed minimally of grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, and communication strategies or strategic competence. The first includes knowledge of the lexical items and rules of morphology, syntax, sentence grammar, semantics, and phonology. The second consists of two sets of rules, socio-cultural rules of use and rules of discourse, knowledge of both of which, is crucial to interpreting utterances for social meaning particularly when "there is a low level of transparency between the literal meaning of an utterance and the speaker's intention."

Strategic competence consists of verbal and non-verbal strategies of communication that may be employed to compensate for communication breakdown attributable to "performance variables or to insufficient competence." Communication strategies are of two kinds: those that are relevant, mainly to grammatical competence and those that relate more to socio-linguistic competence. An example of the first kind is to paraphrase grammatical forms that a person has not mastered or cannot recall, momentarily, while examples of the second would be the various role playing strategies such as how a stranger should be addressed by someone who is uncertain about the stranger's social status.

Other applied linguists, notably, Bachman (1990) and Blum-Kulka and Levenston (1983: 120), have offered additional extensions to communicative competence. Blum-Kulka view semantic competence as consisting of:

1. Awareness of hyponymy, antonymy, converseness, and other possible systematic links between lexical items, by means of which, the substitution of one lexical item for another can be explained in particular contexts.

2. Ability to avoid using specific lexical items by means of circumlocution and paraphrase.

3. Ability to recognize degrees of paraphrasic equivalence.

Bachman has posited two core aspects of linguistic competence, organizational competence which subsumes grammatical and discourse competence, as well as, pragmatic competence which encompasses illocutionary and sociolinguistic competence.

In describing what she regards as a conceptual expansion, Kasper (1997: 345) notes that strategic competence operates at the levels of pragmatic and organizational competence but in a broader sense than that proposed by Canale and Swain. While the ability to solve receptive and productive problems due to lack of knowledge or accessibility remains an aspect of strategic competence, it is now more generally thought of as the ability to use linguistic knowledge efficiently. She adds that the extension is compatible with the view that language use, a version of goal oriented behavior, is always strategic.

It is the American anthropologist, Dell Hymes, in the early seventies, who first put forth the idea of communicative competence. Schacter (1990: 39-40) notes that the "model" of communicative competence proposed initially by him gave tremendous impetus to linguists frustrated by a principal focus on grammatical competence.

Two of those linguists, Tarone and Yule (1989: 17) identify a major shift in perspective within the second language teaching profession.

In relatively simple terms, there has been a change of emphasis from presenting language as a set of forms (grammatical, phonological, lexical) which have to be learned and practiced, to presenting language as a functional system which is used to fulfill a range of communicative purposes. This shift in emphasis has largely taken place as a result of fairly convincing arguments, mainly from ethnographers and others who study language in its context of use, that the ability to use a language should be described as communicative competence.

The principal ethnographer is, of course, Hymes (1971a, 1972, 1977, and 1988) whom Ellis and Roberts (1987: 18-19) claim was interested in: what degree of competence speaker/hearers needed in order to give themselves membership of particular speech communities. He examined what factors--particularly socio-cultural ones--in addition to "grammatical competence" are required for speaker/hearers to participate in meaningful interaction.

Ellis and Roberts add that not only did Hymes "set the sociocultural ball rolling", but he also demonstrated how language variation correlated with social and cultural norms of speech events or certain defined public interactions. And in one of his earliest statements about the broad version of competence Hymes (1971b: 5-10) says the purpose of the linguist is to account for the fact that a "normal child" acquires much more than grammatical knowledge of sentences.

The linguist's problem is to explain how the child comes rapidly to be able to produce and understand (in principle) any and all of grammatical sentences of a language. If we consider a child actually capable of producing all possible sentences, he would probably be institutionalized particularly if not only the sentences but also speech or silence were random or unpredictable. We then have to account for the fact that a normal child acquires knowledge of sentences not only as grammatical but also as appropriate. This is not accounted for in a transformational grammar which divides linguistic theory into two parts: linguistic competence and linguistic performance.

Hymes adds that children acquire repertoires of speech acts and are capable of participating in the performance of speech acts, as well as, evaluating the speech acts of others.

Hymes is talking about competence which is integral to attitudes and values concerning language and other codes of communication. Here is reference to "social factors" which he exemplifies as positive productive aspects of linguistic engagement in social life: there are rules of use without which rules of grammar would be useless.

Criper and Widdowson (1978: 154-157), two principal protagonists of communicative language teaching, adopt a similar stance. They note Chomsky's distinction between competence (the ideal language user's knowledge of grammatical rules) and performance (actual realization of the knowledge in utterances) and add that he has made the latter a prime object of linguistic study. Such choice--they claim--has allowed him to define linguistics by restricting the kind of information about language which has to be accounted for within his theoretical framework.

They characterize the choice as a necessary investigative step in confronting limited problems and achieving their partial or complete solutions prior to increasing the complexity of data studied. This approach is, however, too limited for the language teacher who is concerned, simultaneously, with competence in describing or contrasting language systems and ways of using the systems. In a particular reference to language learning, they say it means learning rules of use, as well as, rules of formal linguistic systems.

Until learners know how to use grammatical resources for sending meaningful messages in real life situations, they cannot be said to know a language. It is essential that they know what varieties of language are used in specific situations, how to vary styles according to their addresses, when they should speak or be silent, what types of gestures are needed for different forms of speech. They insist that the very essence of language is it serves as a means of communication. Language use involves social interaction.

Thus, knowing a language means knowing how it fulfils communicative function. And in what is, surely expression of preference for the broad version of competence, they state that it is inadequate for persons to possess knowledge about rules of sentence formation, they must also know how to utilize rules for the purpose of producing appropriate utterances.

The Hymesian position is endorsed, also, by Hudson (1980: 219-220) who regards communicative competence as much more broadly based than "the 'linguistic competence' of Chomskyan linguistics". Communicative competence includes knowledge of linguistic forms, and ability to use the forms appropriately.

If all of the aforementioned references to competence are appropriate indicators of the broad version, then it would appear that this version could be of dual significance to communicativists. Not only is there indication, within this version, that action is meaningful, it seems, also, to be a version which is entirely compatible with the communicative aim of assisting students to produce target language as central feature of their social interaction. Hence, the broad version could be employed to help learners. And according to Stern (1990: 94-95), interest in communicative language teaching has grown and spread since the late nineteen seventies. "Communication or communicative competence has come to be viewed as the main objective of language teaching; at the same time, communication has increasingly been seen as the instrument, the method, or way of teaching."

Quite apart from Stern's position, Canale and Swain (1980: 35-36) imply, very strongly, that communicative competence could be used as a significant basis to helping students produce target language as a central feature of their social interaction. They state that one of the many aspects of communicative competence which must be investigated, more rigorously, before a communicative approach can be implemented fully in the areas of second language teaching and testing is: development of administratively feasible classroom activities that can be used to encourage meaningful action in target language use.

Some of these activities have been developed by Tarone and Yule (1989: 68-128). They analyze and discuss means, as well as, instruments classroom teachers can utilize to determine students' abilities within areas of grammatical, sociolinguistic, and strategic competence.

It is these very areas which are analyzed as some of the significant components in a Bilingual Proficiency Project, a highly ambitious effort to provide what Schacter (1990: 39) views as empirical justification for a model of linguistic proficiency. This five year research project was conducted in the nineteen eighties at the Modern Language Centre, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Canada. The main purpose of this project was to examine a group of educationally relevant issues concerned with the second language development of school age children. Three of the issues were the effect of classroom treatment on second language learning, the relation of social-environmental factors to bilingual proficiency, and the relation between age and language proficiency (Allen, Cummins, Harley, and Swain 1990: 1).

While Schacter does express reservations about adequacy and clarity of the concept, communicative competence, as well as, its exemplification in the project, she does not recommend its rejection. She--in fact--endorses Chomsky's grammatical or linguistic competence, although she notes three issues of special relevance to the project. They are: what are the major constitutive components of communicative competence, whether--and to what extent--the components can be delineated clearly.

In responding to her concerns, not only do project researchers, (Allen, Cummins, Harley, and Swain 1990: 53) accept Chomsky's linguistic competence, but they also claim to be demonstrating a broadening of competence. An exchange between the two parties about competence is quite revealing.

Schacter says that beyond the level of isolated sentences, confusion, disagreement and fragmentation are reflected in "the overall state of knowledge" about communicative competence. On the other hand, the researchers emphasize that grammar, discourse, and sociolinguistic constructs do not "represent everything that is involved in communicative competence." They, however, express their research aims: isolate aspects of communicative competence they consider to be educationally relevant, test the hypothesis that these aspects would emerge "as distinct components and would be differentially manifested under different task conditions and in different learning settings."

It would not be unreasonable to state that efforts to identify some of the foregoing aspects take place by examining communication strategies among foreign and second language users. Standing prominently among the investigators are: Yule and Tarone (1997), Poulisse (1997), Rampton (1997), Wilkes-Gibbs (1997), Kasper and Kellerman (1997), Wagner and Firth (1997). There is, doubtless, no single account of what constitutes communication strategies. These strategies can, however, be classified under two broad categories, those derived from psycholinguistic and interactional views of communication.

The psycholinguistic or "intra-individual" perspective is neatly summarized by Kasper and Kellerman (1997: 2) who state that its proponents locate CS in models of speech production or cognitive organization and processing. Proponents of the interactive approach, on the other hand, locate communication strategies within the social and contextually contingent aspects of language production which covers features of use characterized as "problematic." (Wagner and Firth 1997: 325-327).

Crucial to understanding these problematic aspects is knowing about markers which indicate that speakers experience difficulty in expressing talk. Such speakers "flag" problems in discourse encoding, thus signaling the imminence of a communication strategy. Flagging provides speaker/hearers with information about how utterances are to be interpreted and acted upon and can be exemplified by such phenomena as pausing, change of voice quality, or intonation contour, and rhythms.

Wagner and Firth note that what is essential to the interactional approach is investigating how communication is attained as a situated, contingent accomplishment. Interactionists regard communication strategies as things displayed publicly and made visible to an analyst via participants' actions. Emphasis is on the social, rather than, individual or cognitive processes underlying talk. Interactionists define instances of talk as communication strategies, if and only if participants, themselves, make an encoded related problem public in the talk and, thus, engage, individually or collaboratively, in efforts to resolve the problem. Communication strategies are available to analysts, only in so far as they are produced and reacted upon by parties to talk. Further, the encoding problem may be either purely linguistic or a combination of the linguistic and conceptual.

CONCLUSION

When we draw some implications into language classroom from the development of the theory of communicative competence, the term communicative approach is often associated with it. On the surface level, it seems reasonable to say that the goal of communicative approach of language teaching is to make learners acquire communicative competence. If it is so, then learners have to cover all related components that were discussed above. This is too demanding a goal for any learner to achieve.

We must be aware that there is some degree of discrepancy between the principles of Communicative Language Teaching and what the theory of Communicative Competence suggests. Communicative Language Teaching emphasized on the ability to execute one's communicative needs rather than on the complete knowledge of language use for communication. According to Richards and Rodgers (1986), Communicative Language Teaching has some priority principles such as:

Use > usage

Meaning > form

Fluency > accuracy

The notion of Communicative Competence intended by Hymes does not provide any priorities for any single components, or aspects over another. Hymes did not claim that a language user does not need to have a accurate knowledge of linguistic form or usage, but rather claimed that the perfect knowledge of linguistic form is not enough to make him/her a communicatively competent language user. Wolfson (1989) points out that grammatical competence is an intrinsic part of communicative competence but in many cases, the term Communicative Competence misinterpreted for language teachers and curriculum developers as the separation of grammatical competence from Communicative Competence.

If Communicative Language Teaching's goal should be the acquisition of Communicative Competence in TL, this is highly demanding for any L2 learner to achieve and does not seem achievable, consequently. Therefore, if we need to set up an accessible goal of LT, we must first assess what kind and level of communicative competence will be sufficient for specific L2 learners in a specific situations. This means that learning goals cannot be prescribed until learners' needs and wants and the contexts in which they use TL are described. Also, the curriculum has to be designed by the gradual developmental change of learner's language. Therefore, the focuses and emphases on form/function or fluency/accuracy should be shifted and consequently, the priorities mentioned above will be changed as the course and language learners' language ability progress.

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