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Communicative Competence

Many linguists have defined the term of communicative competence,

for example: Dell Hymes referred to communicative competence as that aspect of

our competence that enables us to convey and interpret messages and tonegotiate meanings interpersonally within specific contexts. We know that does not

matter how the intelligence of the person is, because sometimes the person can be

intelligent at the moment to understand or analyze problems or some kind of in

formations, but he or she does not the capacity to share, to speak in a

comprehensive and understandable way what he/she is thinking and wants to say.

In other hand, the linguist James Cummins proposed a distinction

between Cognitive /academic language proficiency (CALP) and basic interpersonal

communicative skills (BICS). CALP (Cognitive / academic language proficiency a

language-related term which refers to formal academic learning. used to discuss

the language proficiency levels of students who are in the process of acquiring a

new language. Communicative competence involves the ability to function in a truly

communicative setting. It is like a dynamic interpersonal trait that involves two or

more persons negotiating meaning together. Basic interpersonal communicative

skills (BICS) language skills needed to interact in social situations, primarily to

context- bound, face-to-face communication.

To understand the competence approach to language teaching first we

have to review what a competence is and what kind of competences there are.

Communicative competence falls in the category of a basic or key competence.

Several approaches have been discussed to understand this competence both

from the basic educational side and the language teaching one. So we can lists

the competences of both approaches. And what we find is that the content of the

language teaching side can also be found in the basic educational side. The

sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic competences are the same in the

educational approach. And the grammatical competence relates to the linguistic.

This tells us that in order to teach a language we must first study who to teach in

general. This will help us understand what a competence is and how they all

interact in forming a competent student.

7/29/2019 Communicative Competence. Johanna Lara

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Other important definition is by Michael Canale and Merrill Swain who

mention four different components, or subcategories, make up the construct of

communicative competence, which are: Grammatical competence, Discourse

competence, Sociolinguistic competence, and Strategic competence.

Those are the four aspects that they mentioned. Grammatical

competence is the ability to recognize and produce the distinctive grammatical

structures of a language and to use them effectively in communication.

Discourse competence is the ability we have to connect sentences in stretches of

discourse and to form a meaningful whole out of a series of utterances.

Sociolinguistic competence is the ability to interpret the social meaning of the

choice of linguistic varieties and to use language with the appropriate socialmeaning for the communication situation.

Strategic competence is the manner of manipulating language in order to meet

communicative goals. It used to compensate communication disruption caused by

lack of communicative competence and to strengthen communicative effects.

Because sometimes the person does not have the ability to speak with fluency,

and there are some strategic to help them to improve their competence in order to

have a good communicative competence.

By: Johanna del Carmen Lara Ramirez