COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE AND LANGUAGE TEACHING

1. The model of communicative competence: the bases of communicative approaches to L2 language teaching-founded by Canale and Swain (1980) and expanded by Canale (1983)- an integrative theoretical framework with four main competencies: grammatical, sociolinguistics, strategic, and discourse competence.

• grammatical competence: the knowledge of the language code (vocabulary, rules of pronunciation and spelling, word formation and sentence structure)• sociolinguistic competence: the knowledge of the socio-cultural rules of use in particular context•Strategic competence: the knowledge of how to use verbal and nonverbal communication strategies to handle breakdown in communication•Discourse competence: the knowledge of achieving coherence and cohesion in a spoken or written text.

2. The description of the relationship among them: the model of communicative competence by Savignon (1983), adopted the shape of inverted pyramid to show how an increase in only one component produces in the overall level of communicative competence, because all components are interrelated to each other communicative competence construct

• Critics:• Pragmatic competence was explicitly considered as the component of

communicative competence• No attention was paid to the key role of four skills in the framework

• Bachman (1987) developed a model of communicative language ability: language competence, strategic competence, and psychomotor skills.

• Language competence: • organizational competence (grammatical competence and textual

competence) • pragmatic competence (illocutionary competence; the knowledge of

pragmatic conventions for performing acceptable language functions and sociolinguistic competence; the knowledge of the sociolinguistic conventions for performing language functions appropriately in a given context

• Strategic competence: allowing language users to employ the elements depending on the context to negotiate meaning

• Psychomotor skills or psychophysiological mechanisms(Bachman 1990): receptive (oral or visual) and productive mode (aural or visual) in which the competence is performed through a particular type of channel

Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, and Thurrell (1995)• start with the core (discourse competence): the selection and sequencing of sentences to achieve a unified text, spoken or written. •Linguistic competence entails the basic elements of communication as sentence patterns, morphological inflections, phonological and orthographic systems, lexical resources (i.e., formulaic constructions, collocations or phrases related to conversational structure). •Sociocultural competence refers to the speaker’s knowledge of how to express appropriate messages within the social and cultural context of communication in which they are produced.•Actional competence involves the understanding of the speakers’ communicative intent by performing and interpreting speech act sets. •Finally, these four components are influenced by the last one, strategiccompetence, which is concerned with the knowledge of communicationstrategies and how to use them.

This model thus provides a clear picture of the interrelationship among all the components.

Alcón (2000) also proposes a model of communicative competence, which is a hybrid of the models proposed by Bachman (1990) and Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, and Thurrell (1995). Alcón (2000) suggests that discourse competence influences the abilities of listening, speaking, reading and writing, which are interrelated to one another in order to use the language for communicative purposes. Three aspects of Alcón’s (2000) model are of particular interest: 1) discourse competence is the core of the model; 2) an explicit function is given to the four psychomotor skills (speaking, listening, reading and writing), and 3) strategic competence is an important component in its own right that incorporates both communication and learning strategies. However, although it may be assumed that Alcón (2000) includes sociolinguistic , it is our view that these competencies should be considered separately, given the increasing recognition nowadays associated to cultural aspects.

Cortazzi and Jin (1999): culture is a wide framework of values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviors that are used to subjectively interpret other people’s actions and patterns of thinking.

• Foreign language learners should become aware of different cultural

aspects if they are to make an appropriate interpretation of the target language.

• To foster L2 learners’ knowledge of the skills required to be successful in intercultural communication

• the development of intercultural communicative competence should be included within a communicative approach for L2 teaching.

This competence by Meyer (1991: 137): the ability of a person to behave adequately in a flexible manner when confronted with actions, attitudes and expectations of representatives of foreign cultures.” Byram (1997) proposed a model of intercultural communicative competence, given the need to integrate the teaching of interculturalcommunicative skills as part of classroom instruction.

A proposed framework of communicative competence integrating the four skills

The proposed framework contains five components which appear inside rectangular boxes of the same size, namely, discourse, linguistic, pragmatic, intercultural and strategic. This construct aims at 1) showing the relationship among all the components 2) incorporating both the pragmatic and the Intercultural competencies on their own3) highlighting the function of the four skills to build discourse competence.

competence

competence

L S

R W

L in guisticcom pe ten c e

Pragm aticcom p etence

Interculturalcompe tence

S trategiccom p etence Discourse

com p etence

Discourse competence refers to the selection and sequencing of utterances or sentences to achieve a cohesive and coherent spoken or written text

the integration of the four skills (i.e., listening, speaking, reading and writing) is explicitly accomplished within the core of our proposed framework,

Byram’s (1997: 48, italics ours) definition of discourse as “the ability to use, discover and negotiate strategies for the production and interpretation of monologue or dialogue texts which follow the conventions of the culture of an interlocutor or are negotiated as intercultural texts for particular purposes.”Linguistic competence not only refers to the grammatical competence but also includes all the elements in the linguistic system which involve the phonology, grammar and vocabulary aspects illustrated in Celce-Murcia and Olshtain’s (2000) work.

Pragmatic competence: 1 illocutionary (the knowledge needed to perform language functions and speech act sets), similar to the actional competence proposed by Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, and Thurrell (1995). 2. Sociolinguistic types of knowledge: knowledge of sociopragmatic factors such as participant and situational variables as well as politenessIssues (components included in the sociocultural competence developed by Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, and Thurrell (1995).Intercultural competence involves both cultural (sociocultural knowledge of the target language community, knowledge of dialects and cross-cultural awareness) and non-verbal communicative factors (body language, use of space, touching or silence)