Educacion

COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE

Chomsky (1965) suggests that a native speaker has, somewhere in his brain, a set of grammar rules which he can use to make sentences with.By using the rule as a base we can select the vocabulary to mean the things we want. He states that grammatical knowledge is the competence and the realisation of theserules as sentences is called performance.

Dell Hymes (1972) considers that Chomsky’s notion of competence did not account sufficiently for the social and functionalrules of language. He held that knowledge of grammar rules was not good for a native speaker if he did not know how to use the language those rules produced. Hedistinguishes four aspects of this competence:
• Systematic potential: the native speaker possesses a system that has potential to create a lot of language.
•Feasibility: whether something is possible in the language or not.
• Appropriacy: to know what language is appropriate in a given situation.
• Occurrence: to know howoften something is said in the language.

Swain and V.E. developed models to show communicative competence, with particular reference to L2 speakers. Canale and Swain’smodel has four major components:
• Grammatical competence: is the knowledge of lexical items and rules.
• Discourse competence: is the ability we have toconnect sentences in stretches of discourse and to form a meaningful whole out of a series of utterances.
• Sociolinguistic competence: is the knowledge of the socialcultural rules of language and discourse.
• Strategic competence: the verbal and non-verbal communication strategies to compensate for breakdowns in communication.