LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION . LANGUAGE FUNCTIONS. COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE: ITS COMPONENTS.

Introduction In the 21st Century we can already see the rapid evolution of information technology in our lives: emails, text-messaging, internet. In fact, never has communication been so far-reaching or so fast. The world has become smaller and we can now video conference from opposite ends of the world. The field of cybernetics studies this phenomenon of rapid growth whose new terminology has already become part of our lives. It is clear that human society loves to communicate. We have a complex array of sounds that we combine to create different messages but that is certainly too simplistic a way to describe communication. Our utterances essentially perform a function so when discussing communication we have to consider the function that is intended. The success of this communication will then demonstrate our competence in it. It is for this reason that the topic under discussion here covers communication, language functions and communicative competence. This understanding of language is essential in modern language teaching since a key methodology is the notional-functional approach which owes its origins to the studies of communicative competence by various linguists of note such as Dell Hymes and Canale and Swain.