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TEMA 1 “EOI”

LENGUAJE Y COMUNICACIÓN. FUNCIONES

DEL LENGUAJE. LA COMPETENCIA
COMUNICATIVA. SUS COMPONENTES.

UNIT 1 ‘EOI’

LANGUANGE AND COMMUNICATION.

FUNCTIONS OF LANGUAGE.
COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE. ITS
COMPONENTS.

By Cristóbal Martínez Alfaro

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OUTLINE

1. INTRODUCTION.

2. COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE.

3. CONTEXT OF COMMUNICATION.

4. PEDAGOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS.

5. CONCLUSION.

6. BIBLIOGRAPHY.

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1. INTRODUCTION.

The present unit deals with Communicative Competence, that is, a

person’s unconscious knowledge of the rules governing the appropriate use of
the language in social situations. It is usually contrasted with linguistic
competence, the person’s unconscious knowledge of the formal patterning of
language. Communicative competence includes our formal patterning of
language. Communicative competence includes our awareness of the factors
which govern acceptable speech, such as how to begin and end conversations,
how to interrupt, how to address people, and how to behave in special speech
situations (e. g. apologising, thanking, and expressing formality or informality).
Mastering a language means to have acquired a level of Communicative
Competence. A distinction has to be made between that which a speaker of a
language knows implicitly (competence), and how he actually speaks the
language (performance).
The term Communicative Competence was coined by Dell Hymes, who
believed that competence alone was not enough to explain a native speaker's
knowledge, as a native can not only use grammatically correct forms, but also
knows when and where to use them.
The present unit deals with Communicative Competence, that is, a
person’s unconscious knowledge of the rules governing the appropriate use of
the language in social situations. It is usually contrasted with linguistic
competence, the person’s unconscious knowledge of the formal patterning of
language. Communicative competence includes our formal patterning of
language. Communicative competence includes our awareness of the factors
which govern acceptable speech, such as how to begin and end conversations,
how to interrupt, how to address people, and how to behave in special speech
situations (e. g. apologising, thanking, and expressing formality or informality)
The notion of competence emerged in the 1960s as a tenet of
Chomskyan linguistics. It has since led to the development of several related
terms, notably pragmatic or communicative competence, referring to the
ability to produce and understand sentences appropriate to the social context in
which they occur.

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During the past 25 years or so, communicative language teaching has

been the dominant approach to the teaching of foreign and second languages.
Much of this ascendancy is due to the sociolinguist Dell Hymes (1967) who in a
series of articles developed the notion of communicative competence. Hymes
was convinced that Chomsky’s (1965) notion of competence defined as a
speaker-hearer’s underlying mental representation of grammatical rules
was far too narrow. Instead communicative competence takes us one step
further than purely grammatical competence, into the area of pragmatics which
deals with the use of language in everyday communicative situations. CC is
therefore concerned not only with what is grammatical but also what is
appropriate in a given social situation.
Working along similar lines, Cummins (1979, 1980) suggested that there
should be a distinction made between cognitive/academic language
proficiency (CALP) and basic interpersonal communicative skills ( BICS).
CALP refers to the aspect of proficiency in which the learner reflects on the
surface features of the language outside of the immediate situational or
interpersonal context. This is the aspect o proficiency which learners might use
in doing classroom grammar exercises which focus on grammatical form. In
contrast to this, BICS is the communicative capacity which all children must
acquire in order to be able to function in everyday interpersonal messages.
The most important study on developing the notion of CC from Dell
Hymes work has been done by Canale and Swain (1980). There is also a useful
discussion of this in Swain (1980) which is especially useful for those
approaching communicative competence from a second language acquisition
point of view. Here the notion of CC is divided up into four subcomponents
which are glossed below.
At classroom level, the content of this unit connects with the necessary
background the teacher must have to encourage communication in the class.
By providing the students with the necessary support makes them use the
language in the appropriate context, so that the student can distinguish between
formal and informal English, and can also be aware of what sort of functional
content to use according to the person he/she is addressing to or the type of
message he/she wants to communicate. Apart from that, the Spanish current
legislation, ever since LOGSE appeared in 1990, has highly emphasised on the

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learner’s achievement of all the different communicative competences, also

included in the Foreign Language General Objectives, in the different Content
Blocks and in the corresponding Evaluation Criteria of each level, in the
different Autonomous Communities.

2. COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE.

o Historical background.

Sociolinguists and psycholinguists soon found Chomsky's competence-

performance distinction to be too restricted to account for language in use. To
Chomsky, competence was the internalised knowledge of the system of
syntactic and phonological rules of the language that the ideal speaker-hearer
possesses in the native language; and performance was language in use by the
individual (full of hesitations, false starts, and convoluted syntax), which was not
a faithful reflection of the individual's competence. Consequently, to Chomsky
performance was of little theoretical interest. His critics, however, felt that there
were aspects of what he labelled "performance" that were obviously rule-
governed, although the rules to which the speaker was conforming were not
syntactic, in Chomsky's sense of the term. They felt that these aspects of
language behaviour, which were related to the sociocultural context in which the
speaker-hearer was operating, should be considered part of the language
user's competence.
Soon the term "communicative competence" was coined to cover this
extended notion of competence. Hymes described communicative competence
as "what speaker needs to know to communicate effectively in culturally
significant settings". According to Hymes, a child learning a language acquires,
along with a system of grammar, "a system of its use, regarding persons,
places, purposes, other modes of communication... patterns of the sequential
use of language in conversation, address, standard routines". Hence, the most
important task for sociolinguistic research was the identification of the "rules,
pattern, purposes and consequences of language use" and an account of their
interrelations.

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The significant of Hymes' work for non-native language teaching has been
in its profound replacement of formal linguistic knowledge by functional linguistic
knowledge, in the shift it has caused from knowing how to produce a correct
sentence to knowing how to produce an appropriate, socially acceptable and
natural one.

o Communicative Competence Reviewed.

There is still much confusion and disagreement, however on what

constitutes competence beyond the level of grammar. This is not surprising,
since the gap between knowledge of the structure of a sentence studied in
isolation and knowledge of what is conveyed in uttering that sentence in a
particular setting is a wide one. Exploration of that gap occupies the attention of
a large number of linguists these days. Particularly relevant in the context of this
project is the question of what the major constitutive components of
communicative competence are whether and to what extent they can be clearly
delineated.
The framework within which project developers are working was originally
Canale and Swain (1980), with subsequent modifications during the course of
the project itself. The final decision was to claim that there are four major
components: grammatical competence, discourse competence,
sociolinguistic competence and strategic competence.

o Grammatical Competence.

Involves the "computational aspect of language", the rules or formulations

or constraints that allow us to pair sound with meaning, the rules that form
syntactic constructions of phonological or semantic patterns of varied sorts.
However, note that it is not still clear that any current theory of grammar can be
selected over others to characterise. This competence nor in what ways a
theory of grammar is directly relevant for second language pedagogy.

o Discourse Competence.

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This type of competence concerns mastery of how to combine

grammatical forms and meanings to achieve a unified spoken or written text in
different genres.
Unity of a text is achieved through cohesion in form and coherence in
meaning. Cohesion deals with how utterances are linked structurally and
facilitates interpretation of a text. Coherence, refers to the relationships among
the different meanings in a text, where these meanings may be literal meanings,
communicative functions, and attitudes.
There is, of course, a field of discourse analysis whose practitioners view it
as a tool for the exploration of this vast area between knowledge of linguistic
structure and knowledge of culture. So, it could be stated that if "discourse
competence" is to be viewed as knowledge of the structure of text, then it would
be more appropriate to view it as part of sociolinguistic competence.

o Sociolinguistic Competence.

The earlier Canale and Swain (1980) conception of sociolinguistic

competence viewed it as being composed of two sets of rules: sociocultural
rules of use, and rules of discourse.
Canale (1983) characterises sociolinguistic knowledge as knowledge of
"the extent to which utterances are produced and understood appropriately in
different sociolinguistic contexts depending on contextual factors such as status
of participants, purposes of the interaction, and norms or conventions of
interaction" and discourse knowledge as "mastery of how to combine
grammatical forms and meanings to achieve a unified spoken or written text in
different genres" what is unclear is the conceptual justification for the separation
of discoursal and sociolinguistic knowledge into distinct components. Surely
unity of a text involves appropriateness and depends on contextual factors such
as status of the participants, purposes of the interaction, and norms or
conventions of interaction.

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o Strategic Competence.

In Canale 1983, strategic competence composed of "mastery of verbal

and non-verbal communication strategies that may be called into action for two
main reasons:
1. to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to limiting conditions in
actual communication (e.g.: momentary inability to recall an idea of
grammatical form) or
2. to insufficient competence in one or more of the other areas of
communicative competence and to enhance the effectiveness of
communication (e.g.: deliberately slow and soft speech for rhetorical effect).
Of course such strategies need to be limited to resolving grammatical
problems: actual communication will also require learners to handle problems
of a sociolinguistic nature (e.g.: how to achieve coherence in a text when
unsure of cohesion devices).

3. CONTEXT OF COMMUNICATION.

Following Loveday's research, to transmit and decode meaning, we must

do much more than arrange our sounds and words in a special order. One has
to be aware of the diverse ways of constructing a message, which, rarely
obvious and definable, constitute unquestioned principles of presenting the
sound and word patterns together with other symbols. This code for verbal
conduct is our communicative competence and it fulfils a multitude of social
functions and is largely determined by the sociocultural system.
Loveday shows the linguistic constituents of communicative competence
resulting in the construction of meaning and some of their contextual
determinants. In the diagram the meaning-carrying elements of communication
are placed in a box-arrow representing the Speaker's output. Of course, these
constituents alter and adapt according to the context of interaction, i.e. are
dynamic in nature. They are also influenced and constrained by social values
and Speaking conventions.

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The construction of contextual meaning: the sociolinguistic constituents of

communicative competence and some of their contextual determinants
producing meaning

The diagram further shows that meaning is not the simple result of
transmitting the appropriate signals but emerges in relation to what the
interactants try to demonstrate they are doing, what they have done before and
what they are momentarily engaged in. The meaning only derives from the
context of ongoing interaction. Furthermore, the speaker should not be taken as
an automaton responding to environmental stimuli but as someone who can
manipulate the communication system for himself in accordance with social
practices and needs.
Before showing the constituents of communicative competence in action, it
is necessary to distinguish between symbolising and framing patterns. By
symbolising patterns, we mean the various channels available for transmitting
and estimating meaning which include linguistic forms (phonetic, grammatical,
lexical) and non-verbal forms such as gesture but also appearance (dress,
body decoration, etc.) Framing patterns refer to the principles and

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conventions which connect, compose and regulate communicative behaviour

but which are not intrinsically symbolic although they are given meanings. Both
framing and symbolising patterns function in accordance with the social and
cultural beliefs, values and practices of the community which employ them.
They function in unison, helping to clarify sense, modifying each other and
accommodating to the context. Their meaning only comes into being when they
occur with and adapt to the contextual determinants shown in the diagram.
Thus, their separation here is a totally artificial but useful theoretical construct.

o Framing Patterns.

These refer to the "machinery" for controlling and managing one's self-
presentation in communication according to social expectations and norms.
Among the expressional norms, one finds that communities differ in their
evaluation of the amount of speech necessary for appropriate and successful
interaction. When we turn to the second type of framing patterns, the norms for
organising the business of language clearly vary interculturally. The conventions
for routine communication are particularly interesting to examine. The English
speaker who opens up a conversation with how awful or nice the weather is
today tends to appear to Germans (who were informally asked about it) as
somewhat mentally retarded. Although it might seem irrelevant as to who or
how a conversation is started. It has been found that the person who speaks
first, also controls the topic of the conversations and assumes the role of a
'summoner'.
Conversational openings are not meaningless mechanisms but
generally bear a significant influence on the rest of the exchanges because one
of their functions is to set the relationship between the participants; it is during
the opening sequence that the partners evaluate each other and judge whether
and in what way further interaction can be developed.
This brings us to differences in the timing of verbal exchanges during
conversations which are often a source of considerable frustration in cross-
cultural communication. Some communities are used to immediate responses
from interlocutors, others time their exchanges to leave pauses between each
statement. According to this, we have the following patterns:

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The chronemic variation, that is to say, the interval of time between the
verbal interchanges of the participant and silence. A contrastive study between
English and Spanish has been scarcely realised. Our first impression is that
both factors are different in these two languages. We think silence is more
embarrassing for a Spanish interlocutor than for an English one. We also
consider that a pause produced by an English speaker may be interpreted as
"his turn" to talk (an interruption could be produced), instead of being just a
pause for the English.
Further diversity in framing patterns exists in an area which has been
appropriately referred to as chunking which relates to the strategies of
conceptual organisation expressed in language. European thinking and story
making is often arranged in three parts while others are organised in four. The
effects of this difference, it seems, would be that those engaged in cross-
cultural communication are always out of synchrony with each other.
Now chunking, together with opening, distributing and even timing
linguistic behaviour are all closely connected with a fundamental aspect of
communication, namely sequencing. L2 teachers and most linguists have
restricted their attention to the phonological and grammatical sequencing of
words up to the level of the sentence. However various contemporary studies
have investigated structures beyond sentence limits and discovered supra-
sentential sequencing rules. Some of these have been found in interaction and
others in written communication.
All language is a linear representation and in order to ensure coherence
we sequence language, repeat, substitute and delete, making it possible for it to
simultaneously refer to what has gone before and anticipate what is to follow.
These patterns of cross-referencing between sentences and utterances
constitute the organisation of discourse and occurs according to certain
principles of purpose that belong to generally unconscious social knowledge. In
order to make sense of acceptable paragraphs, essays, monologues, etc., the
listener-interpreter has to make connections between the propositions in each
statement. These connections are generally not expressed since the speaker-
writer assumes that they are accessible. However, the connections are
contextually and culturally determined. According to Van Dijk every piece of
discourse and text possesses a "superstructure", that is to say, a conventionally

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recognisable pattern for their particular arranging. Clyne offers some comments
on the relationship between discourse structure and culture. He suggests that
this is due to culture-specific patterns of discourse organisation. English
requires linearity while German appears to favour digression and "parenthetical
amplifications of subordinate elements". Drawing upon Kaplan's study of non-
English discourse structure in the essays of foreign students in the USA, this
can be diagrammatically illustrated in the following way:

When it comes to the use of non-native of the divergent, culturally-

specific sequencing norms, we find that L2-employing adults are expected to
know these apparently "universal" principles. When they do not conform to them
they are classified as "illogical" or worse, "stupid" simply because the natives
cannot so readily supply the propositions that are taken for granted.

o Symbolising Patterns.

Symbolising patterns are, like framing patterns, employed without an

awareness of their cultural specificity.
Let us start with the traditional domains of language which symbolise:
grammar and vocabulary. If I asked the question "why don't you read this book?
"I am not requesting for an explanation about why you will not read a particular
book but asking you to do so. This is what is technically known as an indirect
speech act and refers to those phrases whose surface form and social function
differ. Direct speech acts are a usual component of language teaching, e.g.:
the command "Read this please". Of course, to recognise the social function of
indirect speech acts one has to be familiar with the contexts in which they are

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employed, i.e. their sociocultural embedding. Moreover, many speech acts have
been ritualised or institutionalised which frequently means that speakers do not
take them literally, e.g.: The natural response to "Oh, I don't have a pen" is to
obey the implicit command and give the speaker a pen and not to remain
inactive while the speaker jumbles around demonstratively.
Actually, indirect speech acts are one of the most frequent components in
strategies of politeness, especially in English. Ways of expressing politeness
are, of course, a central area of concern in the learning and using of non-native
communicative competence. The fundamental resources of verbal politeness
are its "softening devices" which Bublitz has summarised for English. Let us see
some of them: modal verbs which suggest the Speaker's assumptional
approach, e.g.: "The train should be there by now" the employment of indefinite
pronouns and the passive, e.g.: "could someone give me a lift" and "I don't like
being shouted at" these softeners are essential for the establishment and
maintenance of satisfactory social relations. Moreover, grammatical and
phonetic errors are not considered as gravely as violations against
appropriateness. As Bublitz writes, inappropriate linguistic behaviour is
interpreted rather as personal weakness or even a personality defect
(arrogance, coldness, tactlessness) and not as a lack in L2 mastery to which
they are often attributable. It would make sense if they were also integrated into
the early phases of the L2 teaching process and not simply "grafted" on at an
advanced level.
Every speech-community possesses a stock of ritual routines which
may or may not include formulae for greeting, leave taking, apologising,
thanking, congratulating, stumbling (oops), cursing, toasting, introducing and so
on. When L1 speakers do not possess formulistic competence they can be
interpreted not only as lacking in politeness and sophistication but also as
incompletely socialised. Formulae, of course, also define status and the
situation, e.g.: "hi" versus "goad morning".
When handling specific topics in conversation, the language could switch.
The problem of linguistic appropriacy is one of the key-concepts in
communicative competence. It also brings us to the important question of the
diversity of synonymous forms. It seems to be that where multilingual
communities use different languages for signalling social symbols, monolingual

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communities use different styles and dialects. L2 speakers must be able to

recognise and produce more than just the formal and usually written style and
should be aware of the internal variation within language, whether it is based on
social distance or on regional, class, age and ethnic differences. L2 learners
should additionally be familiar with the so-called "co-occurrence rules" which
make sentences such as "How's it going your Eminence? Centrifuging okay?".
There exists, however, another highly significant symbolic code hardly
ever touched upon in the L2 classroom known as paralanguage, that is to say,
the vocal, kinetic (gestural) and proxemic (spatial) channels which
accompany, interfuse, and partly synchronise the traditionally recognised ones.
Talking about the first paralinguistic code (vocal channel) we shall deal which
the tone of the voice. Voice quality provides different kinds of information: it
helps give us a picture of a person's stature and physique, age and sex,
medical condition and personality but it also carries social information. Often
particular accepts have a specially associated voice quality which gives clues to
regional and social status, sometimes also occupation.
According to Poyatos and Hall we can infer that the English tonal structure
is wider and varied than the Spanish one: the Spaniard speaking English
sounds monotonous to the English native. On the contrary, the English speaker
uses a higher pitch than the Spanish one; meanwhile loudness is stronger in
Spanish than in English. Besides, the gestural code is wider in Spanish than in
English, but it is also more redundant as far as proxemics (spatial symbolism) is
concerned, it has been widely demonstrated that it is closer between Spaniards
than between English people.

4. PEDAGOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS.

It is important to be clear about the goals of teaching communicative

competence because the techniques and procedures of teaching competence
forms part of communicative competence, so our students need just as always
to acquire a basic knowledge of linguistic forms. The teaching points here can
be broken down to specific sounds, grammar patterns and vocabulary items in
the traditional skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing.

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But learning specific sounds and patterns does not necessarily entail the
ability to use them, and our students need practice in using the linguistic forms
for the social purpose of language. Rivers discusses the need for students to
use language for the normal purposes of language: establishing social relations,
seeking and giving information, etc. There is enough experimental evidence that
this is a necessary step in efficient language learning, and so it must be
incorporated in the teaching process as well. You need to be certain that such
interaction activities form part of your curriculum on a frequent and regular
basic, in beginning courses as well as in advanced.
There are two basic classes of communicative interaction activities,
depending on the teaching point, and there is room for both in the curriculum. In
one kind of exercises, the teaching point is simply to get meaning across, to be
able to communicate some referential meaning in the target language. These
we have called exercises in communicative performance, and they are excellent
and necessary for developing linguistic competence. In the other type of
exercises the teaching point is getting meaning across in a socially acceptable
way, and typically these exercises contain culturally relevant information, social
interactional rules. Only the latter we have called activities for developing
communicative competence we can point four basic types of activities in various
combinations for developing communicative competence: social formulas and
dialogues, community oriented tasks, problem-solving, activities, and role-play.

5. CONCLUSION.

Communicative competence is a concept introduced by Dell Hymes and

discussed and redefined by many authors. Hymes original idea was that
speakers of a language have to have more than grammatical competence in
order to be able to communicate effectively in a language; they also need to
know how language is used by members of a speech community to accomplish
their purposes.
The linguistics aspects of communicative competence are those that have
to do with achieving an internalized functional knowledge of the elements and
structures of the language.

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Grammatical Competence refers to the knowledge of the rules of a

language and the ability to use them.
Discourse Competence implies the ability to combine form and thought
with coherence.
Sociolinguistic Competence is the ability to use the code appropriately
in different communicative contexts.
Sociocultural Competence is the ability to use the language in
accordance with the rules of the society.
Strategic Competence is the ability to solve problems in communication
which arise because of partial lack of any of the other competences, especially
linguistic competence.
We would still have difficulty deciding in many particular instances
whether or not a particular aspect of language was or was not an
exemplification of one kind of competence or another, that is, delimitation would
still cause problems. Some of the features chosen to exemplify one kind of
competence, it would be related to another kind of competence.
The brief explanation of framing and symbolising patterns demonstrates
the immense complexity of the communication process and its multiple
channels. The patterns involved here have very diverse functions but the most
immediate and relevant ones for the L2 Speaker-actor are:
The establishing and maintaining of interpersonal relations, the provision
of feedback, e.g.: agreement, apathy rejection; the signalling of the nature of a
social relationship, e.g.: as distant, informal or status-full.
As well as these basic indications, interactants also use the patterns to
evaluate each other's personality. Thus, there is a constant monitoring of
intended and uncontrolled verbal and non-verbal signs in order to make sense
of what the person means and is.
The L2 speaker actor certainly needs to be sensitised to their cultural and
contextual relativity.
It appears that native speakers are much more ready to excuse L2
deviancy in areas of grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation but when it comes
to the deviant handling of framing and other symbolising patterns, the native
often perceives the L2 Speaker-actor as impolite, uneducated, aggressive,
indifferent or uncooperative.

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What is ideally required is a degree of mutual tolerance and willingness to

make an effort to understand cross-cultural transactions.

6. BIBLIOGRAPHY.

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the facts? How can we explain them?’ in M Velmans (ed.), The science of
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University Press, 1996).
 Bachman L F, Fundamental considerations in language testing. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1990).
 Canale, M. & Swain, M.: "Theoretical Bases of Communicative Approaches
to Second Language Teaching and Testing", Applied linguistics, 1, 1-47,
1980.
 Canale, M.: "From Communicative Competence to Communicative
Language Pedagogy", in J. Richards and R. Schmidt (eds.). Language and
Communication. New York, Longman, 1983.
 Coletes, A.: "Sociolingüística y dialectología inglesas", en V.A., "Plan de
Estudios y Programas de las Asignaturas. Especialidad de Inglés". Murcia.
Facultad de Letras, 1984.
 Dam L., Learner autonomy 3: From theory to classroom practice (Dublin:
Authentik, 1995).
 Hymes, D.: "On Communicative Competence", J.B. Pride and D. Holmes,
Sociolinguistics, Harnondsworth, Penguin, 1972.
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UPDATED EDITION CRISTÓBAL MARTÍNEZ ALFARO. INGLÉS. EPO 17 - 17