A classroom model of communicative competence

A great deal of work with teaching and testing for communicative competence has been done in Canada, where there is widespread public support and even demand for the development of functional l2skills.the promotion of bilingualism at both federal and provincial levels has resulted in a variety of experimental language teaching programs for learners of all ages and educational backgrounds. One of these programs includes an evaluation of communicative competence in French as a second language for schoolchildren in the province of Ontario. As a preliminary step in this evaluation, Canale and Swain (1980) conducted an extensive survey of communicative approaches to language teaching. Their purpose was to develop a theoretical framework for subsequent curriculum design and evaluation in L2 programs. The framework they have proposed and subsequently refined (Canale, forthcoming) merits attention because it brings together the various views communicative competence we have considered and places linguistic competence, or sentence, or sentence-level grammatical competence, into a proper perspective within the larger construct of competence competence. The four components of communicative competence that this framework indentifies are grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, and strategic compentence. The remainder of this section elaborates on the nature of each of these components with examples from language learning and teaching. Together these four components suggest a model of communicative competence as a basis for curriculum design classroom practice.

—Grammatical competence is linguistic competence in the restricted sense of the term as it has been used by Chomsky and most other linguists. It is that part of language performance with which we are most familiar, that is, the grammatical well-formedness that has provided the focus of L2 study for centuries. The descriptions of grammar we have followed have been different. Traditional grammars, which provide rules of usage that are proper for written language, have their foundation in the word classes or categories of meaning established for classical Greek and Latin. Structural grammar has focused on spoken language and provides an analysis of observable surface from and their patterns of distribution. Transformational generative grammar is concerned with the relation between the grammatical interpretation of sentences and surface structure as a means of discovering universal categories of grammar and the nature of human cognitive processes in general. Though definitions differ, the goal in each case is an adequate description of the sentence-level formal features of language. A particular grammar represents an attempt to describe how the elements of language systematically combine. Deciding whether or not a particular structures exists or is possible is based on the frequency of occurrence of these structures in the speech and writing of native speakers, as it is on the intuitions of native speakers with long practice in the use of the language.

Grammatical competence has been the domain of linguistic studies proper, but sociolinguistic competence is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry having to do with the social rules of language use. Sociolinguistic 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 in the elaborated by Hymes. Although we have yet to formulate a satisfactory description of the language code, we are even further from an adequate description of sociocultural rules of appropriateness. Yet native speakers know these rules and use them to communicate successfully in different situations. One of the goals of intercultural analysis to make explicit the rules of a culture and thereby help nonnatives to understand and adapt more easily to patterns with which they are unfamiliar.

Discourse competence is concerned not with the interpretation of isolated sentences but with the connection of a series of a series of sentences or utterances to from a meaningful whole. Like sociolinguistic competence it is the subject of interdisciplinary inquiry. The theory and analysis of discourse bring together many disciplines- for example, linguistic, literary criticism, psychology, sociology, anthropology, print and broadcast media. Recognition of the theme or topic of a paragraph, chapter, or book, getting the gist of a telephone conversation, poem, television commercial, office memo recipe, or legal document requires discourse competence. It is apparent from the preceding examples that the organizational patterns of discourse differ, depending on the nature of the text and the context in which it appears. Patterns do exist, however, and they play an important role in the interpretation and expression of meaning, a global meaning that is always greater than the sum of the individual sentences or utterances that make up a text. A description of the various structures underlying discourse is sometimes referred to as discourse grammar (Morgan 1981)

The connections that exist between sentences are often not explicit. That is to say, there may be no overt expression of a link between one proposition and another. Based on general knowledge of the real world, as well as familiarity with a particular context, a reader/listener infers meaning. The meaning of a text, then, to return to the premises of speech act theory, depends on the values, intentions, and purposes of the reader\hearer, as well as on those of the writer\speaker. The following examples illustrate the role of inference in the interpretation of discourse.

• 1.    Chico suddenly turned and ran because he saw a policeman coming down the street.

• 2.    Chico saw a policeman coming down the street. Suddenly he turned and ran.

In the sentence example (1), the relation between the two propositions, Chico suddenly turned and ran and he saw a policeman, is explicit. Our knowledge of grammar and of the word because lets us relate the two parts of the sentence. In the discourse example (2), grammatical competence alone will not provide meaning. Interpretation requires an ability to make a common-sense inference of the situation. We might well interpret the discourse to mean Chico, a policeman might conclude as follows.

Chico saw a policeman coming down the street. Suddenly he turned and ran. The 5th street bus had just passed him by and he was going to be late for school again! There was no time to ask about Pedro. Maybe tomorrow.

Text coherence is the relation of all sentences or utterances in a text to a single global proposition. Text coherence is the relation of all sentences or utterances in a text to a single global proposition. The establishment of a global meaning or topic for a whole passage, conversation, book, etc. is in integral part of both expression and interpretation and makes possible the understanding of the individual sentences or utterances included in a text. Local connections or structural links between individual sentences provide what is sometimes referred to as cohesion, a particular kind of coherence. Some examples of the formal cohesive devices that are used to connect language with itself are pronouns, conjunctions, synonyms, ellipses, comparisons, and parallel structures. The identification by Halliday and Hasan (1976) of various cohesive devices used in English is well known, and it has begun to have an influence on text analysis as well as on teach- ing and testing materials for English as a second language (ESL).

There is no such person as an ideal speaker\hearer of a language, one who known the language perfectly and uses it appropriately in all social interactions. None of us knows all there is to know of French or Japanese or Spanish or English. We make the best use of what we do know, of the contexts we have experienced, to get our message across. Communicative competence, whether in our native language or a second language, is relative. The strategies that one uses to compensate for imperfect knowledge of rules or limiting factors in their application such as fatigue, distraction, and inattention- may be characterized in the Canale (forthcoming) framework. It is analogous to the need for coping or survival strategies indentified in Savignon (1972b). What do you do when you cannot think of a word? What are the ways of keeping the channels of communication open while you pause to collect your thoughts? How do you let your interlocutor know you did not understand a particular word? or that he or she was speaking too fast? How do you, in turn, adapt when your message is misunderstood? Adult native speakers routinely cope with a variety of factors that, if not taken into account, can result in communication failure. The strategies we use to sustain communication include paraphrase, circumlocution, repetition, hesitation, avoidance, and guessing, as well as shifts in register and style

“It is now half a centry ago since N.M.Petersen uttered these golden words, and still the old grammar- instruction lives and flourishes with its rigmaroles and rules and exceptions” And again, - Language is not an end in itself . . . it is a way of connection between souls, a means of communication”.

No the course of language teaching methodology never has run smooth and before we take too much pride in recent innovations we would do well to consider the long history of language teaching that has preceded us.it is a goal we would do well to keep in sight as pursue the methods and means of communicative competence.

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