Communicative Competence

Communicative Competence

This term was first introduced by Dell Hymes in linguistics as a response to Chomsky’s view in 1965 about the distinction between “competence” and “performance” which made “competence” an abstract notion

  v According to Hymes

    “Communicative competence refers to the ability to use the grammatical knowledge of syntax, morphology, phonology and social knowledge about how and when to use utterances appropriately in real-life situations”

1.  Four Elements of Communicative Competence by Swain

1.1         Grammatical Competence

The ability to produce grammatically correct utterances and knowing how to use grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of a language

1.2         Sociolinguistic Competence

Ability to produce sociolinguistically appropriate utterances

1.3         Discourse Competence

Ability to produce cohesive and coherent utterances

1.4         Strategic Competence

Ability to solve communicative problems by appropriate use of communicative strategies

2.   Importance of communicative Competence

Communicative competence is important in higher education because language functions to enable students to acquire knowledge and skills in various disciplines and to develop individuals into intellectual, social, and civic beings for the benefit of society.

3.  Example

A competent communicator will engage in turn-taking when in conversation instead of interrupting

He knows when and to ask questions to the audience to receive feedback from them

4.  Critiques of Communicative Competence

Over the years the notion of communicative competence and its uses has been critiqued by several scholars for different reasons.

Ø Lillis (2006) points out how notions like context, speaker, speech community, and appropriateness, which are treated as quite unproblematic by Hymes, have been subject to recent reexamination by different scholars

Ø Leung (2005: 124) Points out that the re-contextualization of the notion of communicative competence from Hymes ethnographically oriented work to educational contexts has resulted in an epistemic transformation from empirically oriented questions to an idealized pedagogic doctrine.

Ø Other scholars have criticized the essentialist assumptions underlying the notion of communicative competence, its frequent alignments, and the individual focus on competence as misleading.

 

5.  Conclusion

Testing communicative competence was and still is in his modern era of the most important notions that came as a response to the previous paradigm that mainly focused on language use rather than usage. In English, it became necessary to focus on communicating efficiently in context.