1. Communicative Competence. Analysis Of Its Components

1. COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE. ANALYSIS OF ITS COMPONENTS

1. INTRODUCTION.
2. LINGUISTIC APPROACH: CHOMSKY
3. SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACH: HYMES
4. THEORETICAL APPROACH: CANALE & SWAIN
5. CONCLUSION
6. EXPLOITATION OF THE TOPIC IN THE CLASSROOM.
7. LEGAL FRAMEWORK
8. BIBLIOGRAPHY



1. INTRODUCTION
Since its introduction by Dell Hymes in the 1970s, the notion of communicative competencehas enjoyed popularity among teachers, researchers and other scholars interested in language. In the field of Second Language Teaching, this general interest in language for communication purposes has been considered as a promising departure to abandon the narrower and still popular focus on language as mere grammatical study. Thistopic is going to focus on what Communicative Competence is, paying attention to its roots and development.
2. LINGUISTIC APPROACH: CHOMSKY
In 1957, American linguist Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures, book that proved to be a turning point in the 20th-century linguistics. He developed the conception of a transformational-generative grammar which departed radically from theStructuralist and Behaviourist theories*of the previous decades, which failed to take into account the difference between ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ levels of grammatical structure.
Chomsky drew a fundamental distinction between a person’s knowledge of the rules of a language and the actual use of that language in real situations. The first he referred to as competence; the second as performance.
-COMPETENCE: itis a person’ s unconscious knowledge of the system of rules underlying his/her language and by which a person is able to understand and produce well-formed sentences. It is conceived as a mental process.
-PERFORMANCE: it is the speaker’s actual use of language as a means of communication.
The description of the rules governing the structure of this competence was thus the most important goal.However, Chomsky was only centred on the linguistic aspect of the language; he aimed at achieving linguistic competence (person’s unconscious knowledge of the formal patterning of the language –being able to construct and understand grammatically correct sentences in a language, even those that we have never listened to or uttered before) but failed to take into consideration the social dimensionof language, the fact that language does not occur in isolation but in a social context and also reflects social purposes. In this respect, knowing the linguistic code in order to make sentences is important to master a language but it does not involve success in communication. In all, the knowledge of the system is the basis for communication but does not guarantee it if it is not accompanied byother types of knowledge and skills.
To give an account of this, new attempts to make up for that lack in Chomsky’s studies were made (Searle, Halliday, Lakoff) but it was not until Hymes that the term communicative competence was introduced.
2. SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACH
Linguist Dell Hymes was the one who introduced the term communicative competence. His original idea was that speakers of alanguage have to have more than linguistic competence in order to be able to communicate effectively in a language: they also need to know how language is used by members of a speech community (it varies according to different cultures) to accomplish their purposes. That is to say, competent speakers of a language should know what to say, to whom and how to say it.
He thus replaced Chomsky’slinguistic competence by his own concept of communicative competence.Communicative competence is, thus, the ability to use, produce and understand sentences appropriate to the social context in which they occur. It has some features:
. Linguistic aspects
To achieve a functional knowledge of the elements and structures of the language one needs:
. Phonological competence: ability to recognise and...