Communicative Competence and Sociolinguistic Competence

Communicative Competence

• Definition: Communicative competence refers to a language user's knowledge of grammar (syntax, morphology, phonology) and social understanding of when and how to use utterances appropriately.

• Origin: The term was coined by Dell Hymes in 1966 as a reaction to Noam Chomsky’s competence and performance distinction.

• Hymes' Approach: Included communicative form and function in integral relation, leading to the ethnography of communication.

• Debate: Communicative competence is considered a superior model of language compared to Chomsky's linguistic competence.

• Canale and Swain's Four Components (1980):

  • Grammatical Competence: Knowledge of phonology, orthography, vocabulary, word formation, and sentence formation.

  • Sociolinguistic Competence: Knowledge of sociocultural rules of use, ability to handle settings, topics, and communicative functions in different sociolinguistic contexts, and the use of appropriate grammatical forms.

  • Discourse Competence: Mastery of understanding and producing texts in listening, speaking, reading, and writing, dealing with cohesion and coherence in different types of texts.

  • Strategic Competence: Compensatory strategies for grammatical, sociolinguistic, or discourse difficulties, such as using reference sources, paraphrasing, requesting repetition or clarification, dealing with background noise, and using gap fillers.

Sociolinguistic Competence

• Definition: Knowledge of the sociocultural rules of language and discourse (Brown, 2000).

  • Includes sensitivity to dialect or variety, choice of register, naturalness, and knowledge of cultural references and figures of speech.

• Tarone and Swain's Definition (1995): Ability of members of a speech community to adapt their speech to the context.

  • Formal variety in an interview vs. informal register among friends.

• Two Areas of Sociolinguistic Competence:

  • Appropriateness of form (Pragma-linguistics): Linguistic strategies and resources needed to encode and decode a given illocution (Leech, 1983). For example, a linguistic strategy for making a request is conventional indirectness (e.g., Could you clean the dishes?), while the linguistic resources to realize this conventionally indirect request can include questions, modals, or hedges. Pragma-linguistics is language specific and closely related to grammatical knowledge.

  • Appropriateness of meaning (Socio-pragmatics): Rules and conventions of situationally, culturally, and socially appropriate language use.

    • Includes knowledge about taboos, mutual rights, obligations, and conventional courses of action in a given speech community.

    • Awareness of sociocultural variables such as social distance, relative power, and degree of imposition.

    • Knowing when conventional indirectness is more appropriate than directness.

• Cross-cultural Misunderstandings:

  • Arise from failure in appropriate use of pragma-linguistic and socio-pragmatic competence.

  • What is appropriate in one cultural situation may be inappropriate in another.

  • Learners often cannot differentiate between the rules of speaking in their native context and the target context.

• Acquisition: Rules of speaking can be gradually acquired when the learner is immersed in the target culture.

• Second/Foreign Language Context: Raising learners’ awareness about the rules of speaking might help them acquire these skills more efficiently in less time (Dr Silhadi).