In the mid-1990s I had many discussions with colleagues concerning the role of ‘communicative competence’ in language teaching and applied linguistics. The term communicative competence was coined by Hymes (1972), who defined it as the knowledge of both rules of grammar and rules of language use appropriate to a given context.
Bachman’s (1990) model of communicative language ability included three elements, namely language competence, strategic competence and physiological mechanisms.
· Language competence comprises two further components: organisational and pragmatic competence.
-On the one hand, organisational competence consists of grammatical and textual competence, thereby paralleling Canale’s (1983) discourse competence.
-On the other hand, 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.
Celce-Murcia et al. (1995) further divided communicative competence into linguistic, sociocultural, strategic, discourse and actional competencies. In analysing these components they start with the core, that is to say:
· Discourse competence, which concerns the selection and sequencing of sentences to achieve a unified spoken or written text. This competence is placed in a position where linguistic, sociocultural and actional competencies shape discourse competence, which in turn, also shapes each of the three components.
This is where the top-down communicative intent and sociocultural knowledge intersect with the lexical and grammatical resources to express messages and attitudes and to create coherent texts. Celce-Murcia et al. (1995: 13–15)describe several sub-areas of discourse competence, four of which are mostimportant with regard to the current model:
a. cohesion: conventions regarding use of reference (anaphora/cataphora), substitution/ ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical chains (i.e. Halliday and Hasan l976).
b. deixis: situational grounding achieved through use of personal pronouns, spatial terms (here/there; this/that), temporal terms (now/then; before/after), and textual reference (e.g. the following table, the figure above).
c. coherence: expressing purpose/intent through appropriate content schemata, managing old and new information, maintaining temporal continuity and other organizational schemata through conventionally recognized means.
d. generic structure: formal schemata that allow the user to identify an oral discourse segment as a conversation, narrative, interview, service encounter, report, lecture, sermon, etc.
· Linguistic competence entails the basic elements of communication, such as sentence patterns, morphological inflections, phonological and orthographic systems, as well as lexical resources.
Linguistic competence includes four types of knowledge:
1. phonological: includes both segmentals (vowels, consonants, syllable types) and suprasegmentals (prominence/stress, intonation, and rhythm).
2. lexical: knowledge of both content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) and unction words (pronouns, determiners, prepositions, verbal auxiliaries, etc.).
3. morphological: parts of speech, grammatical inflections, productive derivational processes.
4. syntactic: constituent/phrase structure, word order (both canonical and marked), basic sentence types, modification, coordination, subordination, embedding.
· Sociocultural competence Sociocultural competence refers to the speaker’s pragmatic knowledge, i.e. how to express messages appropriately within the overall social and cultural context of communication. This includes knowledge of language variation with reference to sociocultural norms of the target language. In fact a social or cultural blunder can be far more serious than a linguistic error when one is engaged in oral communication.
Celce-Murcia et al. (1995: 23–24) describe several sociocultural variables, three of which are most crucial in terms of the current model.
1. social contextual factors: the participants’ age, gender, status, social distance and their relations to each other re: power and affect.
2. stylistic appropriateness: politeness strategies, a sense of genres and registers.
3. cultural factors: background knowledge of the target language group, major dialects/regional differences, and cross cultural awareness.
· Actional competence involves the understanding of the speakers’ communicative intent by performing and interpreting speech act sets.
Interactional competence has at least three sub-components relevant to the current model:
1. actional competence: knowledge of how to perform common speech acts and speech act sets in the target language involving interactions such as information exchanges, interpersonal exchanges, expression of opinions and feelings, problems (complaining, blaming, regretting, apologizing, etc.), future scenarios (hopes, goals, promises, predictions, etc.)
2. conversational competence: inherent to the turn-taking system in conversation described by Sachs et.al. (l974) but may be extendable to other dialogic genres:
· how to open and close conversations
· how to establish and change topics
· how to get, hold, and relinquish the floor
· how to interrupt
· how to collaborate and backchannel, etc.
3. non-verbal/paralinguistic competence includes:
· kinesics (body language), non-verbal turn-taking signals, backchannel behaviors, gestures, affect markers, eye contact.
· proxemics (use of space by interlocutors)
· haptic behavior (touching)
· non-linguistic utterances with interactional import (e.g. ahhh!
· Uh-oh. Huh?) the role of silence and pauses.
· Strategic competence, which is concerned with the knowledge of communication strategies and how to use them. Strategic competence refers to those fixed and prefabricated chunks of language that speakers use heavily in everyday interactions.
1. routines: fixed phrases like of course, all of a sudden and formulaic chunks like How do you do? I’m fine, thanks; how are you?
2. collocations:
- verb-object: spend money, play the piano
-adverb-adjective: statistically significant, mutually intelligible
- adjective-noun: tall building, legible handwriting
3. idioms: e.g., to kick the bucket = to die; to get the ax = to be fired/terminated
4. lexical frames: e.g., I’m looking for ______________. See you (later/tomorrow/ next week, etc)
At about that time applied linguists and language teachers were developing the communicative approach to language teaching in reaction to grammar translation and audiolingual approaches to language pedagogy. Many applied linguists adopted Hymes’ terminology and perspective, and his notion of communicative competence thus became part of the theoretical justification for a new language teaching approach and new teaching materials that were compatible with communication as the goal of second or foreign language teaching.
Teaching communicative competence through the four skills: A focus on intercultural competence
In an attempt to help language teachers tackle cultural aspects in the language classroom, the purpose of this final section is that of proposing a cultural project for building learners’ communicative competence in the target language. The project is organized around three main stages: explanation, collection and implementation, which are described in turn.
1. Explanation
In the first stage, i.e. Explanation, the teacher explains to learners the concept of intercultural competence in order to make them aware of the importance of paying attention to the culture of the target language. Once the concept has been introduced, learners are told they are to explore the culture of the target language and they are presented with a list of key areas that offer the possibility for developing intercultural competence, including Family, Education, Law and Order or Power and Politics among others.
2. Collection
In the second step, i.e. Collection, learners are given the task to gather material outside the classroom in relation with the cultural topics they have agreed to work with in the first stage.
3. Implementation
In the third stage, i.e. Implementation, learners work with a variety of activities that require their use of the four skills (i.e., listening, speaking, reading and writing) in order to develop their overall communicative competence, and promote their cross-cultural awareness and understanding.
a. Listening skill: Sample activities
Activities such as video-taped cultural dialogues, audio- or video-taped cultural misunderstandings and taped-recorded interviews with native speakers, among many others, could promote listening skills with a special emphasis on the intercultural competence.
b. Speaking skill: Sample activities
Activity formats such as face-to-face tandem learning, making up questions to a native speaker or role-playing, among others, may develop speaking skills with a particular emphasis on the intercultural component.
c. Reading skill: Sample activities
A variety of activities may be used in the language class to develop reading skills with a focus on the intercultural component. This section mentions a few, including critical reading, cultural bump activities, activities that focus on written genres or cultural extensive reading, among others.
d. Writing skill: Sample activities
Activities such as tandem e-mail learning, designing stories and story continuation, among others, may develop writing skills with a particular emphasis on the intercultural component.
Conclusion
Developing learners’ communicative competence has long been among the major goals of L2 instructional programs. It is our position that crucial to that development is an understanding of discourse as the key competence with the rest of the competencies (i.e. linguistic, pragmatic, intercultural and strategic) shaping it. Accordingly, we have argued that the four language skills play a key role in fostering learners’ communicative competence since they are the manifestations of interpreting and producing a spoken or written piece of discourse, as well as a way of manifesting the rest of the components of the communicative competence construct. In this paper, and taking the intercultural competence as the point of departure, we have presented a sampling of activities in the four language skills for helping learners to communicate fluently and appropriately in the target language and culture. Although the four language skills have been presented separately for clarity purposes, the design of most activities has considered all the skills conjointly, consistent with how people interact with each other in real life. As a final remark therefore, we hope that the activities proposed in this paper may help learners see language learning not merely as language practice but as a communicative activity.
No comments:
Post a Comment