COMPONENTS OF COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE

&
COMPETENCE VS PERFORMANCE
 

1. M. Andre Ramadhan (2004410010)

2. Lenny Ita Marbun (2004410003)
 According Bell (1976:20) says that:

1. communicative competence refers to the knowledge possessed by the language

user, not only of the formal code, but the social implication of linguistics choice
which are available to him as he uses it in the course of his life as the participant in
the speech events which are so much a major constituent of human society.

2. The implication of this statement is that, communicative competence also

includes the ability of the speaker to choose linguistic forms and this choice
depends on the participants and speech event.

Definition
 According Canale (1983:6) says that communicative competence is
comprised of some components, namely:

(I) Grammatical Competence,

(II) Sociolinguistic Competence,
(III) Discourse Competence,
(IV) Strategic Competence.

Grammatical Competence
This competence refers to
the mastery of linguistic code,
ability to recognize lexical,
morphological, syntactic and
phonological description of a
language and to manipulate these
features to produce words and
sentences.
Sociolinguistic Competence
This competence requires an understanding of the
social context in which language is used. The context is
depend on some factors such as status of participants,
information they share, purposes of interaction, and norms or
conventions of interaction.
An utterance is considered appropriate or not in
terms of this social context. The appropriateness of
utterances refers to both appropriateness of meaning and
form. Appropriateness of meaning is concerned with how
communicative functions, attitudes and ideas are judged to
the proper in a given situation.
For example it is not appropriate that a secretary to
order the manager to type a letter. Different cultures have
different ways of performing functions.
 Discourse Competence
Discourses competence concerns mastery
of how to combine grammatical forms and Strategic competence

meanings to achieve a unified spoken or written Strategic competence refers to the mastery of
text. verbal and non-verbal communication strategies that
may be used to compensate for breaks downs in
That this competence involves the ability communications because of limiting conditions in
actual communication and to enhance the effectiveness
to interpret a series of sentences or utterances in
of communication.
order to form a meaningful whole and to achieve
unity of text which area relevant to a given
situation. Unity of a text is achieved through
cohesion in form and coherence in meaning.
 Strategic competence refers to the mastery of verbal and
non-verbal communication strategies that may be used to
compensate for breaks downs in communications because
of limiting conditions in actual communication and to
enhance the effectiveness of communication.

Strategic Competence
 Competence Vs Performance
Competence
Person’s knowledge of his language, the
system rules which a language user has
mastered so that it would be possible for
that user to produce and understand an
infinite number of sentences and recognise
grammatical mistakes and ambiguities
Performance
A term used in the linguistic theory of
transformational generative grammar, refer to
language is seen as a set of specific utterances
produced by native speaker.
 After discussing communicative competence and its applications in
language teaching, our came to the conclusion that communicative
competence should be the main objective in the teaching of English as a
foreign language. Only by providing the students with this competence,
we can expect them to be able to communicate appropriately in actual
communication.

Conclusion