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This article was downloaded by: [UQ Library] On: 06 November 2014, At: 17:08 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Reading Research and Instruction Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ulri19 Communicative competence and literacy Teresa Pica a a University of Pennsylvania Published online: 28 Jan 2010. To cite this article: Teresa Pica (1988) Communicative competence and literacy, Reading Research and Instruction, 27:3, 1-15, DOI: 10.1080/19388079809557939 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19388079809557939 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form

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Page 1: Communicative competence and literacy

This article was downloaded by: [UQ Library]On: 06 November 2014, At: 17:08Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T3JH, UK

Reading Research andInstructionPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ulri19

Communicative competenceand literacyTeresa Pica aa University of PennsylvaniaPublished online: 28 Jan 2010.

To cite this article: Teresa Pica (1988) Communicative competence and literacy,Reading Research and Instruction, 27:3, 1-15, DOI: 10.1080/19388079809557939

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19388079809557939

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of allthe information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on ourplatform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensorsmake no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy,completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views ofthe authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis.The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should beindependently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor andFrancis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings,demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, inrelation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private studypurposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form

Page 2: Communicative competence and literacy

to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and usecan be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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Reading Research and Instruction1988, 27, (3) 1 -15

Communicative Competenceand Literacy

Teresa PicaUniversity of Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT

The following article reviews the notion of communicative competence(Hymes 1964,1971), in its expanded version (Canale and Swain 1980) in lightof its relevance for issues in literacy and the teaching of reading. Definitionsare provided for four components of communicative competence, i.e., gram-matical, sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic competence, and their role inthe reading process is discussed in light of linguistic theory and classroomresearch.

Despite widespread commitment to literacy as one of the most impor-tant objectives of our educational system, there does not seem to be aclear-cut consensus among educators as to what literacy consists of orhow one goes about becoming literate. This diversity of viewpoints hasemerged, in part, as a result of the application to literacy issues oftheories, research methods, and empirical data from related disciplines.Work in linguistics, for example, has often shown relevance to questionsregarding reading research and reading instruction. This connection hasbecome increasingly apparent in recent years, as linguists have broaden-ed the scope of their research to educational concerns.

Traditionally, the scope of linguistic research was focused primarily ondescribing the nature of language, especially oral language, in terms ofits phonological, syntactical and lexical systems, and on defininglanguage competence with regard to mastery of these systems. Insightsfrom linguistic analysis served primarily to inform reading specialistsabout the design of teaching materials and the simplification of authentictests. This research, however, offered little insight into the complexitiesof language beyond the word or sentence level, and gave little attentionto the reader's work in confronting these complexities and constructingmeaning from them. It also neglected the educational context in whichchildren learn to read. Linguists' interest in surface constituents oflanguage, their prioritized attention to oral language, and restricteddefinition of language competence helped perpetuate divergent and oftenuninformed views among educators on literacy and reading instruction.

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Of course, there were notable exceptions to these mainstream linguisticpractices. A number of anthropological and socially oriented linguists,(e.g., Firth, 1966) studied language within the context of interpersonal in-teraction. Philosophers of language (Austin, 1962; Grice, 1975; Searle,1969, and Wittgenstein, 1953) drew attention to the functions that wordsand sentences serve beyond their surface forms. Psycholinguists (Luria,1976; Vygotsky, 1962), charted language development and use within theintegrated perspective of social, behavioral, and cognitive experience.These contributions, together with recent work in linguistics, have madea considerable impact on our understanding of literacy and the design ofreading programs. This is especially apparent in three areas of theory andresearch, enumerated below and addressed fully later in this article.

First, efforts to describe language have extended beyond the sound,word and sentence level to include analysis of spoken discourse as well aswritten text. This expansion of interests is very much due to broadeningperspectives on language as a vehicle for expressing and understandingmeaning and a tool for social interaction (Halliday, 1973; Hymes, 1964,1971; Vygotsky, 1962). Language in use is seen as affected by factorssuch as topic (partisan or mutual), medium (oral or written), participantrelationships (speaker to listener and writer to reader), as well as levels offormality and familiarity among each of these factors. Language is view-ed in this social, anthropological, and linguistic framwork as one of themany symbol systems that members of a society use for communicationamong themselves.

Second, studies have been undertaken to identify and describe in-fluences of classroom, home, and community environments on languagedevelopment and literacy. People and the languages they use are studied,not in isolation, but in the context of social interaction. Educationally-or-iented linguists, in extending the domains of anthropological and sociol-inguistic thinking and research, have gone into communities andclassrooms to look at^language and literacy in action and to measure theeffects of various participant, task, and topic variables on the attainmentof literacy in and out of contexts for formal schooling (e.g., Boggs, 1972;Cook-Gumperz and Gumperz, 1982; Heath, 1983; Michaels, 1981Phillips, 1972). Their findings have helped to explain the differential ef-fects of formal schooling on literacy attainment.

Third, theoretical perspectives about what it means to know alanguage have been given a multidimensional framework. It was Hymes(1964, 1971) who first urged that language competence be redefined,reshaped, and relabeled as communicative competence — a constructwhich offers considerable relevance to issues in literacy learning.Language competence is now seen as comprising not only knowledge ofgrammar rules, orthographic conventions, pronunciation patterns andlexical items, but also knowledge of rules for social discourse as well asstrategies for coping with communication when these rule systems are in-accessible.

The four major components of communicative competence, together

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with capsule definitions adapted from Canale and Swain (1980) are: (a)Sociolinguistic Competence, or knowledge of rules by which language isproduced and understood appropriately in different sociocultural con-texts — these rules depend on factors such as roles and status of par-ticipants, their purposes, topics, tasks and norms or conventions for in-teraction; (b) Grammatical Competence, viewed as knowledge of theelements and rules of the language code, for example, vocabulary andrules of word formation, sentence grammar, pronunciation, spelling; (c)Discourse Competence, seen as knowledge of the ways in which linguisticform and meaning combine to achieve unified and functional spoken andwritten texts; and (d) Strategic Competence, or knowledge of verbal andnon-verbal communication strategies that can be called into action whengrammatical, discoursal, and/or sociolinguistic rule systems have notbeen fully developed or are temporarily inaccessible. Knowledge in eachcompetency area does not assume the ability to make explicit the rules ofthese various components or to bring them to the level of consciousawareness. In brief, communicative competence is shown through using arule, not by stating it.

This newly articulated understanding of language competence can shedlight on the structuring of the reading curriculum and has much to offerboth the student and the teacher of reading. When viewed in terms of theinterrelated components of communicative competence, literacy takes ona multitude of dimensions, all of which seem crucial to answering ques-tions regarding what it means to become and to be a competent reader.From the perspective of communicative competence, reading depends onmuch more than decoding words or processing sentences. It involves adynamic and interactive relationship between the reader, a text, and thesocio-cultural backgrounds they represent.

Communicative Competence: Some Background Information

In the mid-twentieth century, Chomsky (1957,1965) directed linguisticstudies away from structuralist concerns (e.g., Bloomfield, 1933) withprocedures for isolating phonological and grammatical elements oflanguage in linguistic descriptions. Whereas structural linguists likeBloomfield and others had focused on 'surface' features of languages,Chomsky concerned himself with 'deep' semantic structures and theways in which sentences are understood and produced by native speakersof a language. His transformational-generative grammar focused on theunderlying grammatical competence he claimed was common to allnative speakers.

Chomsky argued that speakers' actual performance could not directlyreflect their language competence because when language is used in con-crete situations, speakers tend to deviate from grammatical rules, mak-ing slips of the tongue, false starts, etc. Chomsky urged that, in studyinglanguage, linguists needed to ignore these irrelevant details, and focus in-stead on idealized abstractions. In brief, Chomsky claimed that linguists

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needed to distinguish between competence — the ideal speaker-listener'sknowledge of his/her language in terms of the linguistic rules that cangenerate and describe sentences of the language; and performance —what Chomsky considered to be the actual and often deviant use of thelanguage in concrete situations. Chomsky's assumption that all nativespeakers possessed the same underlying competence allowed him andother generative grammarians to check their assumptions of gram-maticality against the intuitions of a single informant; in most cases, thisinformant was the linguist, working alone.

Hymes (1964, 1971) took issue with the formulation of language com-petence proposed by Chomsky. In opposition to Chomsky's view of theideal speaker-listener as a universal abstraction, Hymes looked at the ac-tual speaker-listener in concrete events and gave prominence to thatfeature of language of which Chomsky took no account — social interac-tion. Hymes pointed out that Chomsky's notions of competence and per-formance provided no place for consideration of the appropriateness orsociocultural significance of language in the situational and verbal con-texts in which it is used. Hymes argued that knowing a language meantknowing not only what is grammatical, but also what is appropriate andthat language comeptence includes knowing the rules for language use ina given sociocultural context. It therefore involves knowing when tospeak, when not to speak, what to talk about and with whom, when,where, and in what manner.

Speakers' performances reflect, moreover, relationships between theirown competence, the competence of others involved in the interaction,and the nature of the interaction, itself, as it unfolds. By situatinglinguistic theory within the broad framework of communication andculture, Hymes argued that members of a community or culture behaveand interpret the behavior of others in light of knowledge of the rules forappropriate linguistic behavior they have available to them. For Hymes,this knowledge includes, but is certainly not limited to, Chomsky's focuson the formal possibilities of the linguistic code.

Sociolinguistic Competence and Literacy

Further elaboration on Hymes' notion of communicative competencecan probably best begin with the component most influenced by histhinking — that of sociolinguistic competence. Recent trends inlinguistics and language study have recognized that it is not enough toknow what a language looks like and to be able to describe or evenmeasure its categories, but that one must know what the language meansto its users and how it is used by them. This is where sociolinguistic com-petence fits in. Grammatical or linguistic competence has been the do-main of linguistic studies proper, but sociolinguistic competence reflectsinterdisplinary concerns having to do with the social rules of languageuse. Sociolinguistic competence requires an understanding of the socialcontext in which language is used: the roles of the participants, the infor-

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mation they share, and the function of their interaction. Only in a fullcontext of this kind can judgments be made about the appropriateness ofthe language used.

In terms of literacy, sociolinguistic competence allows the reader torecognize the purposes of texts whether they are stories to be read aloud,poems to be recited, songs to be sung, newspapers to be scanned, letters,jokes, cartoons, memos, menus, etc. Sociolinguistic competence thusenables readers to recognize both a writer's position vis a vis a text aswell as how the writer views them as consumers of the text.

Sociolinguistic competence also enables the reader to deal with anddistinguish between context-reduced and context-embedded language. Ifactual samples of language in use could be placed on a continuum, at oneend there would be no support provided by the situational context forunderstanding the language, whereas at the other end there would bemany contextual cues. At the context-embedded end of the continuum,language is supported by a wide range of visual, paralinguistic and situa-tional cues. Meaning is actively negotiated and created by the par-ticipants and comprehension is checked through immediate feedback. Atthe context-reduced end of the continuum, however, communication isdependent on linguistic cues to meaning. There are no visual or externalsupports. For children, communication at home, with friends, and in theplayground is generally context-embedded, whereas classroom readingand writing are more context-reduced. An important school objective islearning to operate with context-reduced language, but for many childrenthe transition from context-embedded to context-reduced language doesnot come automatically when they enter the classroom.

Not only must students cope with context-reduced texts, but manytopics which they are asked to read about may be unfamiliar to them,given their experiences in their own culture and community. In light oftheir cultural expectations and the experiences they bring to the act ofreading, the students' constructions of meaning may be highly distinc-tive and individualized; they may arrive at interpretations of a text thatdiffer from those which the writer or their teacher had in mind. Studentsmay remember and elaborate upon those elements in the text which holdimportance in terms of their own background knowledge, but overlookunfamiliar details in the text which might have been highly relevant tothe writer or their teacher.

It is often the case that the cultural origin of a story, a report, or even aparagraph may affect the reader's comprehension more than its semanticor syntactic complexity. What may appear to be a reader's difficulty indecoding print or processing meaning may actually be an indication ofdistinct, culturally bound interpretations that the reader has brought tothe text. Sociolinguistic competence enables readers to interpret a textfrom positions other than those of their experiences in community orculture, but achieving this requires a classroom environment whichallows the students time and assistance in expanding their abilities for in-terpretation. In terms of classroom experiences, mere exposure to dif-

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ferent texts is not enough.

Sociolinguistic Competence in Classroom Reading

Recent research on classroom interaction has shown that the classroomsetting has a powerful influence on the way in which students approachreading (Au, 1980; Boggs, 1972; Cochran-Smith, 1984). The way in whichclassroom events are organized and the manner in which reading ispresented as an activity has important consequences for the literacy ac-quisition of students. There are many subtle expectations to whichchildren must conform in the classroom. Three areas seem particularlyimportant in this regard: (a) learning how to participate in classroomevents by following the subtle and shifting, and seldom explicit interac-tional rules set by the teacher; (b) learning to display knowledge publicly,in front of teacher and peers; and (c) learning to communicate in what isconsidered in mainstream classrooms to be a literate, narrative style.

First, with regard to class participation, the rules governing participa-tion in school may be different from norms of interaction in the home,community, or culture. For example, students may be used to a home en-vironment in which it is perfectly natural and expected for more than oneperson to talk at the same time. At the other extreme, students mayenter the mainstream American classroom as older learners, coming fromcultures in which they are not used to volunteering in the classroom ortaking self-appointed turns (Sato, 1982). In fact, in many cultures, suchmoves are considered threats to the teacher's authority and are thusovertly discouraged. In a mainstream American classroom the reluctanceof students to participate voluntarily may mean that they are unlikely toseek help from the teacher with reading materials and assignments theycannot understand.

Some children may not be used to speaking publicly in front of peers.They may be used to cultural norms in which children collaborate apartfrom adult supervision, or they may come from a culture in which onepractices in private prior to displaying a skill in public. Research hasshown that children from communities all over the world, includingnative American Indian children on a Warms Springs, Oregon, reserva-tion, children from traditional Hawaiian culture, and those of WestAustralia Aboriginal society, approach academic tasks as they do socialinteraction in their community, as collaborative, highly interactive ac-tivities. (See Phillips, 1974; Au, 1980; Boggs, 1974; and Malcolm, 1979,respectively for research in these areas.). When called on one at a time todisplay their comprehension of classroom materials, these children areoften silent and appear uncooperative. Yet when allowed to answer inconjunction with their classmates, they become quite eager to talk, andthese patterns of reluctance disappear.

The classroom teacher who is not familiar with these differential pat-terns of student participation may use classroom elicitation and instruc-tional techniques which work against rather than facilitate literacy ac-

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quisition; insisting, for example, that students who are used to workingin collaboration in the community nevertheless work independently inthe classroom, or teachers reduce or avoid interaction altogether withstudents who do not volunteer in class. (See Schinke-Llano, 1983 forresearch on this latter phenomenon.)

What the research reported above has shown is that helping studentsmake the transition from community to classroom by offering them avariety of options for participation, including those they already bringwith them to the classroom, is a more effective way of broadening theirsociolinguistic competence than by pressuring them to conform toclassroom conventions and setting limits on the ways in which they caninteract. What this research has told us is that, in the classroom, sociol-inguistic competence works both ways. Teachers must be sensitive tocross-cultural differences in participation in guiding students toward thecompetence they need for adjustment from the social interactive styles oftheir community to the demands of a classroom setting.

A second concern for the development of sociolinguistic competence inthe classroom is that students may not be used to evaluation/displayquestions such as the kinds of questions which check their knowledge ofinformation to which the questioner already knows the answer (see Longand Sato, 1983; and Mehan, 1979, for further elaboration on this term).Many children, especially those from middle class homes, get askeddisplay questions all the time as they are growing up. Their caretakerspoint to pictures or objects and ask the children to name familiar colorsor shapes, names of animals, etc. Other children, as research by Heath(1983) and others has shown, seldom hear such questions in the home set-ting. They may be used to questions which seek their explanations of ac-tions and events or information needed by their interlocutor. Thesechildren often have difficulty making sense of and providing responses toschool display-type questions.

Display questions are especially prevalent during reading-related ac-tivities, making participation difficult for the children. Again, this maybe perceived as a reading problem when in fact it has to do with students'lack of experience in question and answer procedures in the classroom.Teachers need to be sensitive to students' needs for community toclassroom transition in this area. Heath has, in fact, educated teachers tobe effective in organizing classroom question and answer sessions whichdraw on students' strengths and home backgrounds as a means to theirattainment of school-related literacy.

Finally, some children are not used to communicating in a literate nar-rative style which conforms to the conventions and expectations of theclassroom. Michaels (1981) has shown in her work that differences be-tween children using literate style strategies and those using oral stylestrategies become especially apparent during the sharing time activitiesin elementary school classrooms. For example, some children presentsingle-topic contributions in which ideas are made explicit and are linkedwith supporting details or presented through a story told in a sequence of

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events. Other children, however, appear to present information withseemingly little focus, constantly introducing what are perceived by theirteachers to be extraneous and irrelevant topics. These contributions areoften misunderstood and labelled unacceptable by the teacher when, infact, they represent a topic-associational organizational pattern which ischaracteristic of oral culture styles of narration. Their narrative style isnot necessarily incorrect, but simply inappropriate in terms of socio-linguistic norms of classroom display.

What Michaels found when she analyzed these discursive contributionsin detail was that the children who used them did, in fact, have concep-tual links among their ideas, but that, because they signalled them pro-sodically rather than through rhetorical structures and cohesion devices,these links went unnoticed by their teacher. Thus, when the childrenrelated ideas which were not overtly connected under a single theme, withsupporting examples or a sequence of chronological events, the teacher'sreponse was generally to correct them or simply cut them off. They werethereby denied opportunities for receiving step-by-step assistance inlearning a more explicit narrative style and, perhaps worse, ran the riskof being labeled as having poor oral language abilities or uncooperativeclassroom behavior. Again, the need for an expanded sociolinguisticawareness applies to both teachers and students. Both must learn to copewith and recognize distinctions between an oral narrative style which isthe norm in a home or community and literate narrative style expectedduring classroom presentation.

What must be emphasized is that findings of these language dif-ferences should not be used simply to identify or label language problemsin the classroom. While differences do exist, they are based on amismatch between the sociolinguistic rules, behaviors, and expectationsof children in their communities and those with which they are con-fronted in the classroom. Our job as educators is to figure out how tobridge the gaps for productive learning. To do this, we must understandthe roots of the language children bring to school.

Sociolinguistic competence in a reading perspective means thatstudents need to gain skills for participation in a classroom whose socio-linguistic rules for demonstrating knowledge are quite different fromthose the children have come to know in their everyday social environ-ment. For foreign-born learners, these sociolinguistic rules may be evenmore difficult to achieve, as they may be different from both culturalnorms in their community and their expectations based on previousclassroom experiences. Again, it is not just the students who need to ex-pand their sociolinguistic awareness. Teachers need to be socio-linguistically competent in understanding their students. They must besensitive to the rules for displaying knowledge which students bringfrom the community into their classrooms and work to create a classroomenvironment more accommodating to students' preferred patterns forresponse and interaction.

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Grammatical Competence

Many reading materials focus on the student's grammatical com-petence. The student is presented with a text which is usually syntac-tically and lexically controlled according to criteria such as reductions insentence length and subordinate and embedded clauses and substitutionof more familiar vocabulary. This is followed by a series of comprehen-sion questions. Often there are exercises on vocabulary and word forms.Frequently, in materials for second language learners, the exercises alsoinvolve practice of grammatical forms and patterns.

Attention to texts on this level, because there is little emphasis onreading for communication, represents an impoverished view of languagecompetence. These texts and their accompanying exercises, furthermore,tend to foster word and sentence reading approaches to text which arenot only inefficient, but deny the reader access to meaning in the text.The reader's attention is focused on identifying linguistic constituents ofthe text, but not on the interconnections between sentence elements,especially beyond the clause or sentence level.

In addition, procedures of sentence and word simplification, despitetheir intuitive appeal, often serve to hamper rather than facilitate com-prehension. In our current research (Pica, Doughty, and Young, 1985;Pica, Young and Doughty, 1986), we have found that repetition andparaphrase are what facilitate comprehension. As a result of thesemodifications, sentences become longer and clauses more complex, butcues to meaning override these complexities. With regard to reading com-prehension, we and others (e.g., Blau, 1982; Long, 1985; Chaudron, 1983)have found that what is linguistically more complex is, from a discourseperspective, actually simpler to process.

Certainly, grammatical competence is important in reading and shouldnot be dismissed in any way in a discussion of communicative com-petence and literacy. Grammatical competence plays a vital role inrecognizing the lexical similarities of words marked by surface phoneticdistinctions; words, for example, such as photograph and photography,muscle and muscular, sign and signature (see Bolinger, 1975; and Chom-sky and Halle, 1968, for further discussion of this area). Grammaticalcompetence is also important for recognizing underlying semantic rela-tionships of sentences encoded in different surface structures, for exam-ple in understanding the similarities among active constructions such asJohn liked Mary, passive sentences such as Mary was liked by John andcleft constructions such as It was Mary whom John liked. Grammaticalcompetence also aids the reader in distinguishing the meanings ofsentences such as John liked Mary vs. Mary liked John which contain thesame words and differ only on the basis of word order distinctions. But,certainly, this kind of competence is not sufficient for understandinglonger stretches of discourse such as conversations and texts. This needis met through other aspects of communicative competence, especiallythat of discourse competence.

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Discourse Competence

Discourse competence is intimately connected to grammatical com-petence, but is related not to the of interpretation of isolated sentences,but to the connection of a series of sentences to form a meaningful andfunctional whole. Like sociolinguistic competence, discourse competenceis the subject interdisciplinary inquiry. The theory and analysis ofdiscourse bring together many disciplines, including linguistics, literarycriticism, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Texts make demandson the reader's semantic knowledge, such as how to interpret markers ofcohesion between sentences and how to recognize relationships of con-trast, condition, result, and so forth. Competence at the discourse level oflanguage enables readers to recognize the theme or topic of a paragraph,chapter, or book, get the gist of a poem, office memo, recipe, or legal docu-ment. Discourse competence allows the reader to follow the structure ofarguments and relationships that functional units such as generaliza-tions, exemplifications, and conclusions hold with the rest of the text.Discourse competence, in effect, enables the reader to distinguish a textfrom a random set of sentences.

However, this process is not as automatic as it might seem. Often theconnections that exist among the sentences of a text are not marked ex-plicitly. There may be no overt expression of a link between one proposi-tion and another — no words such as for example, therefore, as a result,on the other hand, can be defined as which help to make meaning ap-parent to the reader. Under these circumstances, the reader must infermeaning from the text based on a general knowledge of the world as wellas a sense of how that world operates in the mind of the author. Thefollowing examples (based on Savignon, 1983) illustrate differences be-tween sentences which have linguistic cues to their interpretation andthose in which the reader must go beyond the linguistic level in order toinfer meaning:

1. Betsy turned and ran toward her house because she saw the big dogcoming down the street.

2. Betsy saw the big dog coming down the street. She turned and rantoward her house.

In the sentences of 1, the relationship between the two propositionsBetsy turned and ran toward her house and She saw the big dog is ex-plicit. Knowledge of grammar and the conventional meaning of the wordbecause helps the reader relate the two parts of the sentence. In thesentences of 2, grammatical competence alone does not provide meaning.Interpretation requires an ability to make a common-sense inference ofthe situation. The reader might, in fact, interpret the discourse to meanBetsy turned and ran toward her house because she saw the big dog com-ing down the street, but to do so requires certain assumptions aboutwhat relationships Betsy, big dogs, houses, etc. might have to each otherand what they might mean to the author. In other words, the readerneeds to create an image of what the author intended to convey in the

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text. This interpretation could easily be invalidated, however, by contex-tual factors of which the reader is unaware. To illustrate, the authormight have wanted the reader to interpret the sentences of 2 as:

3. Betsy saw the big dog coming down the street. She turned and rantoward her house. She remembered the large bone her mother hadset aside to give to him.

Clearly, discourse competence functions far beneath the surface level oflanguage. Discourse competence intersects with grammatical and socio-linguistic competence to enable the reader to infer meaning and functionfrom grammatical structures and lexical items which have less than ob-vious surface cues.

In addition, it is through discourse competence that linguistic itemssuch as pronouns, definite and indefinite articles and demonstratives areseen to serve as reference cues in text interpretation. Verb tenses are in-terpreted not only as time markers — past, present, or future — but alsoto foreground or background information. The choice of tense oftendepends on rhetorical considerations rather than time elements. For ex-ample, discourse competence enables the reader to note that the presentor present perfect tense is used to indicate generalizations while the pastis used to highlight a specific fact or supporting detail (Lackstrom,Selinker, and Trimble, 1970). Examples of this are shown in the very firststatements of this article:

" . . . there does not seem to be a clear-cut consensus amongeducators as to what literacy consists of or how one goes aboutbecoming literate.. . . Until recently, the work of most linguists focused on describingthe nature of language, especially oral language."

The verb in the first sentence is expressed in present tense, while thesecond is written in past tense. However, these different tenses werechosen not to indicate differences in time, but to specify, respectively, ageneralization about literacy and a specific fact about the work oflinguists. The tenses of the verbs in these two sentences function toforeground and background information relevant to literacy. Strict gram-matical knowledge, therefore, at least of the kind found in prescriptivegrammar books, could not have been depended upon to appreciate thisrelationship.

Discourse competence, in relation to grammatical competence, alsohelps to rectify the mistaken belief that mastery of specialist or technicalwords is the key to successful understanding of the language of a par-ticular discipline. More important is how these words are used indiscourse. In fact, review of technical texts (e.g., research by Godmanand Payne, 1981; Kirkman, 1978; and Salager, 1983) has shown thatmany vocabulary items are not specialist words, exclusive to a discipline,but are subtechnical and context independent lexical items, occurringwith high frequency across many disciplines. These are words such assystem, process, function, form, temperature, solution, problem, andstructure. In addition, some commonly used words such as conduct,

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power, and, energy take on technical meaning in particular fields. Dic-tionary definitions are of little help in understanding these words. It isonly within specific disciplines and within their contexts of use that theytake on the meanings that writers wish to convey to their readers.

Strategic Competence

The term strategy is a familiar one in reading research and is definedby Lytle (1982) as a response that readers make to a text in order toresolve their doubts about its meaning when they realize that they havefailed to understand some part of it. Applying Canale and Swain's (1980)perspective on the strategic competence of second language learners tothe act of reading, readers would use strategies when they lack com-petence in grammatical, discoursal, or sociolinguistic areas, or the com-petence they do possess is inaccessible due to constraints such as timepressure or fatigue, or the pressures of public, classroom display.

Strategies thus enable readers to invoke further knowledge of gram-mar, discourse and sociolinguistic rules at times when their initial ap-plication of these rules has not been sufficient for an understanding of atext, or to build on knowledge of rules in one area when that in another islacking. Among the strategies which come into play under such condi-tions are guessing the meanings of unknown words by analyzing thewords into morphological components (using grammatical competence)or through understanding the social context portrayed in a text (usingsociolinguistic competence in the absence of grammatical competence) orby hypothesizing alternative relationships such as cause-effect,comparison-contrast, or generalizations-exemplification (tapping furtherinto discourse competence) after initial attempts at recognizing relation-ships among sentences of the text fail to show a meaningful connectionwith the text as a whole.

Unfortunately, many reading exercises test or check comprehensionrather than facilitate comprehension strategies. This can be seen in thekinds of questions teachers and reading books often ask. What happensis that the reader's comprehension is examined, but strategies for com-prehension are not activated. We do not yet know all of the ways in whichreaders go about resolving doubts and solving problems in making senseof a text. Further research, such as that carried out through Lytle'ssystem of protocol analysis (Lytle 1982) will help educators in turn helpstudents to obtain strategies for deriving meaning from texts when facedwith the shifting functions and intricacies in written language.

Conclusion

Traditional views of language competence have been concerned withgrammatical competence, whereas it is only in recent years that sociol-inguistic, discourse, and strategic competence have been defined and

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described. The increased insight into these components of com-municative competence has resulted from research into how language isactually used in the classroom and the community, and in speech andwriting. What this research has shown is that communicative com-petence is not an absolute construct, but is relative to the socio-psychological characteristics of individuals, their communication needs,and the situations in which they communicate. In order to state what isrequired for students and their teachers to be communicatively compe-tent, therefore, it is necessary to relate communicative competence to theevents in which they participate, to their intentions for speaking andlistening, and to the social roles in which they find themselves inside andout of the classroom.

Such descriptions of communicative competence can be helpful toreading education in a variety of ways; for example, in specifying learnergoals, in analyzing texts, and in planning and structuring reading ac-tivities. Selection of syllabus items and decisions about methods andmaterials can be made with an awareness of students' age, socioculturalbackground, and goals as well as with a sensitivity toward what readingmeans to them in terms of their cultural values and community norms.The role of the teacher can expand from a didactic orientation, so thatteachers can take on an activating role in guiding students through theirtransition from community to classroom, and in cultivating students'respect and appreciation for the cultural diversity represented amongtheir classmates. In this last area, it is important to keep in mind thatcommunicative competence is not a goal for only one segment ofAmerican educational participants. Teachers and students from all walksof life need to expand their knowledge of languages and culture and theirawareness of socio-cultural patterns across cultures and communities. Inthe absence of these skills, teachers and students need to develop interac-tional strategies for coping with classroom demands and for reaching outto help each other appreciate the richness of what they can share.

Many of the difficulties which teachers and students face in meetingeducational demands for the attainment of literacy have arisen not froma defective knowledge of language forms and grammatical rules but froman unfamiliarity with expected patterns of language use. Students maypossess the grammatical, sociolinguistic, and/or discourse competencethey need for their homes, communities, or cultures, but not for themainstream American classroom. Some students may be unprepared todeal with the expectations of a new environment such as the classroomand, likewise, their classmates and teachers may not be equipped to dealwith them. A view of language competence which takes into account theshifting and dynamic patterns of sociolinguistic, grammatical, discourse,and strategic rules provides a means for confronting this educationalchallenge. A focus on communicative competence in the classroom canlead to more culturally enriching experiences for students, a broaderdefinition of literacy, and more enlightened approaches to reading in-struction.

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NOTES

An earlier version of this article was presented at the Symposium on InterdisciplinaryPerspectives on Language in Education, Morton Botel, Chair, International ReadingAssociation Annual Conference, Philadelphia, April 17, 1986. Portions of the researchreported in the article were supported by a University of Pennsylvania Research Founda-tion grant.

Teresa Pica is an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania where she teachescourses in second language acquisition. She also directs the M.S. and Ph.D. programs inTESOL and Educational Linguistics. She can be reached at the Graduate School of Educa-tion, University of Pennsylvania, 3700 Walnut St., Philadelphia, PA 19104.

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