Communicative Competence

Ika Kurniawati Khasanah / 2201409032

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Communicative Competence

The emergence of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) has pedagogical goal to develop learners’ communicative competence, that is the ability to use the linguistic system in effective and appropriate way. Furthermore, this competence becomes a challenge to language practitioners since it requires an understanding of the complex and intergrated nature of the theoritical concept communicative competence. This term communicative competence was coined by Deil Hymes in 1972, as the reaction against the perceived inadequacy of Noam Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance. Hymes (1972) defined communicative competence not only as inherent grammatical competence but also as the ability to use grammatical competence in a variety of communicative situations. In other words, communicative competence defined as the knowledge of both rules of grammar and language use appropriate to a given context.

Hymes’ conceptualization of communicative competence has been further developed by Canale and Swain (1980) and Canale (1983). According to them, communicatieve competence is: “ a synthesis of knowledge of basic grammatical principles, knowledge of how language is used in social setting to perform communicative functions, and knowledge of how utterances and commuicative functions can be combined according to the principles of discourse”. Canale (1983) later expanded the conceptualization of communicative competence by including four competencies under the heading of communicative competence: grammatical competence (i.e. knowledge of the language code); sociolinguistic competence (i.e. knowledge of the sociocultural rules of use in particular context); strategic competence (i.e. knowledge of how to use communication strategies to handle breakdowns in communication); and discourse competence (i.e. knowledge of achieving coherence and cohesion in spoken and written text). Pragmatic competence is essentially included  in this model under sociolinguistic competence, which Canale and Swain (1980: 30) described as sociocultural of use.

Bachman’s (1990) model of communicative competence included three elements, namely language competence (comprises two further components: organisational grammatical and pragmatic competence), strategic competence, and physiolagical mechanisms. Organisational grammatical consists of grammatical and textual competence, thereby paralleling Canale’s (1983) discourse competence. Pragmatic competence consists of illocutionary competence and sociolinguistic competence, the former referring to knowledge of speech acts and language functions, and the latter referring to the knowledge of how to use language functions appropriately in a given context. Then, Celce-Murci et al. (1995) proposed motivated model of communicative competence. They divided it into linguistic, sociocultural, strategic, discourse and actional competencies. They started analyzing these components with the core, discourse competence which concerns the selection and sequencing of sentences to achieve a unified spoken or written text. Linguistic competence entails the basic elements of communication, such as sentence patterns, morphological inflections, phonological and orthographic systems, as well as lexical resources. Sociocultural competence refers to the speaker’s knowledge of how to express appropriate messages within the social and cultural context of communication in which they are produced. Actional competence involves the understanding of the speakers’ communicative intent by performing and interpreting speech act sets. Finally, those four components are influenced by the last one, strategic competence, which is concerned with the knowledge of communication strategies and how to use them.