APPLIED LINGUISTICS for BA Students in English
THE COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH
Defining Communicative Competence
The term "communicative competence" was coined by Dell Hymes (1967, 1972) -a sociolinguist who was convinced that Chomsky's (1965) notion of competence was too limited. Communicative competence, then, is that aspect of our competence that enables us to convey and interpret messages and to negotiate meanings interpersonally within specific contexts.
In the 1970s, research on communicative competence distinguished between linguistic and communicative competence (Hymes 1967, Paulston 1974) to highlight the difference between knowledge "about" language forms and knowledge that enables a person to communicate functionally and interactively.
Seminal work on defining communicative competence was carried out by Michael Canale and Merrill Swain (1980), now the reference point for virtual discussions of communicative competence vis-á-vis second language teach in Canale and Swain's (1980), and later in Canale's (1983) definition, four: different components, or subcategories, make up the construct of communicative competence. The first two subcategories reflect the use of the linguistic stem itself. (Brown 1994: 226-250)
(1) Grammatical competence is that aspect of communicative competence that encompasses "knowledge of lexical items and of rules of morphology, syntax, sentence-grammar semantics, and phonology" (Canale and Swain 1980:29). It is the competence that we associate with mastering the linguistic code of a language, the "linguistic" competence of Hymes and Paulston, referred to above.
(2) The second subcategory is discourse competence, the complement of grammatical competence in many ways. It is the ability we have to connect sentences in stretches of discourse and to form a meaningful whole out of a series of utterances. Discourse means everything from simple spoken conversation to lengthy written texts (articles, books, and the like). While grammatical competence focuses on sentence-level grammar, discourse competence is concerned with intersentential relationships. The last two subcategories define the more functional aspects of communication.
(3) Sociolinguistic competence is the knowledge of the socio-cultural rules of language and of discourse. This type of competence "requires an understanding of the social context in which language is used: the roles of the participants, the information they share, and the function of the interaction. Only in a full context of this kind can judgments be made on the appropriateness of a particular utterance (Savignon 1983: 37).
(4) The fourth subcategory is strategic competence, a construct that is exceedingly complex. Canale and Swain (1980: 30) described strategic competence as "the verbal and nonverbal communication strategies that may be called into action to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to performance variables or due to insufficient competence." Savignon (1983:40) paraphrases this as "the strategies that one uses to compensate for imperfect knowledge of rules-or limiting factors in their application such as fatigue, distraction, and inattention." In short, it is the competence underlying our ability to make repairs, to cope with imperfect knowledge, and to sustain communication through "paraphrase, circumlocution, repetition, hesitation, avoidance, and guessing, as well as shifts in register and style" (Savignon 1983: 40-41).
Strategic competence occupies a special place in an understanding of communication. Actually, definitions of strategic competence that are limited to the notion of "'compensatory strategies" fall short of encompassing the full spectrum of the construct. In a follow-up to the previous (Canale and Swain, 1980) article, Swain (1984:189) amended the earlier notion of strategic competence to include "communication strategies that may be called into action either to enhance the effectiveness of communication or to compensate for breakdowns." (my italics) Similarly, Yule and Tarone (1990: 181) refer to strategic competence as "an ability to select an effective means of performing a communicative act that enables the listener/reader to identify the intended referent." So, all communication strategies may be thought of as arising out of a person's strategic competence. In fact, strategic competence is the way we manipulate language in order to meet communicative goals.
