TEMA 4

LA COMPETENCIA COMUNICATIVA.
ANÁLISIS DE SUS COMPONENTES

INTRODUCTION

 Since its introduction by Hymes in the mid-1960’s, the term “communicative

competence” has enjoyed increasing popularity among teachers, researchers and
others interested in language  in the field of second language pedagogy, this
general interest in language for communication is viewed as a promising departure
from the narrower and still popular focus on language as grammar

 However, there is reason for concern about the less healthy status Hymes’ term has
acquired as a buzzword within applied linguistics  and especially about the
sometimes-fashionable exchange of opinions on this topic

 The reasons for concern are not only that there remains much disagreement on the
applications of communicative competence in second language pedagogy  rather
within applied linguistics one also finds both confusion and lack of consideration of
many of the basic concepts involved in this notion

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COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE AND ACTUAL COMMUNICATION

Definition

 According to Canale and Swain, communicative competence is understood as the

underlying systems of knowledge and skill required for communication  it is an
essential part of actual communication, but is reflected only indirectly, and
sometimes imperfectly due to general limiting psychological and environmental
conditions (interfering noises, fatigue, distractions…)

 It is important to stress that communicative competence refers to both knowledge

and skill in using this knowledge when interacting in actual communication 
knowledge refers here to what one knows (consciously or unconsciously) and skill
to how well one can perform this knowledge in actual communication

 The term “actual communication” is preferred here  since the earlier term
“performance” by Chomsky introduced a lot of confusion together with the term
“competence”

 The distinction made by Chomsky says that “competence” is a speaker intuitive

knowledge of the rules of his native language  and “performance” is what he
produces by applying these rules

 The perfect knowledge referred to here is the mastery of the abstract system of
rules by which a person is able to understand and produce any well-formed
sentence of his language  while the actual use of language is the domain of
linguistic performance

 This distinction has been rather controversial and had a lot of opponents like
Halliday who rejects this dichotomy as being of little use in a sociological contexts 
and Hymes, who claims that Chomsky’s view fails to account for a whole dimension,
the sociocultural

The relation between communicative competence and actual communication

 Although the general distinction between knowledge and skill is easily drawn and
largely accepted, precise definitions of knowledge and skill remain elusive and
controversial  the relation of this distinction to the one between communicative
competence and actual communication is also a source of disagreement

 For example, Kempson (1977) treats skill as part of a theory of actual

communication and not as part of a theory of competence  in contrast, Wieman
and Backlund (1980) seek to incorporate this notion of skill into a theory of
communicative competence

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 Again, the view here is that both knowledge and skill underlie actual
communication in a systematic and necessary way  and are thus included in
communicative competence

 Furthermore, this view is not only consistent with the distinction between
communicative competence and actual communication but depends on it  in
particular, this notion of skill requires a distinction between underlying capacities
(competence) and their manifestation in concrete situations (actual
communication)

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COMPONENTS OF COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE

 Canale and Swain describe the theoretical framework for communicative

competence as including four areas of knowledge and skill

Grammatical competence

 This type of competence remains concerned with mastery of the language code
(verbal or non-verbal) itself  thus, included here are features and rules of the
language such us vocabulary, word formation, sentence formation, pronunciation,
spelling, and linguistic semantics

 Such competence focuses on the knowledge and skill required to understand and
express the literal meaning of utterances  as such, grammatical competence will be
an important concern for any second language programme

 However, it is not clear that any current theory of grammar can be selected over
others to characterize this competence  nor in what ways a theory of grammar is
relevant for second language pedagogy

Sociolinguistic competence

 Sociolinguistic competence addresses the extent to which utterances are produced

and understood in different sociolinguistic contexts  depending on contextual
factors such as the status of participants, the purposes of interaction and the norms
or conventions of interaction

 Appropriateness of utterances refers to both  and appropriateness of meaning

concerns the extent to which particular communicative functions, attitudes and
ideas are judged to be proper in a given situation

 Appropriateness of form concerns the extent to which a given meaning is

represented in a verbal and/or non-verbal form that is proper in a given
sociolinguistic context  this notion of appropriateness of form includes what
Richards (1981) and others have called “interactional competence” which addresses
appropriateness of kinesics and proxemics

 There is a tendency in many second language programmes to treat sociolinguistic

competence as less important than grammatical competence this tendency seems
odd for two reasons

— it gives the impression that grammatical correctness of utterances is more

important than appropriateness of utterances in actual communication

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 — this tendency ignores the fact that sociolinguistic competence is crucial in
interpreting utterances for their social meaning
Discourse competence