Class 4B
Group 4
- Leny Mutmafidah
- Nikita Nurul Milati
- Ahmad Ivan Fathoni

COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE

            Communicative competence is a construct that has been a topic of interest for at least four decades, recent trends have put less emphasis on structural and cognitive characteristic of communication and more on the myriad social, cultural, and pragmatic implications of what it means to communicate in a second language.

            Communicative competence became a household phrase in second language acquisition, and with its pedagogical counterpart, communicative language teaching, stil stands as an appropriate term to capture many of the most recent trends in research and teaching.

Defining Communicative Competence

            Communicative competence as aspect of our competence that enables us to convey and interpret messages and to negotiate meanings interpersonally within specific contexts.

            James Cummins (1980, 1979) proposed a distinction between cognitive or academic language proficiency (CALP) and basic interpersonal communicative skill (BISC). CALP is that dimension of proficiency in which the learner manipulates or reflects upon the surface features of language outside of the immediate interpersonal context. BISC is the communicative capacity that all children acquire in order to be able to function in daily interpersonal exchanges.

            Four different components, or subcategories, made up the construct of communicative competence.

1.      Grammatical competence is that aspect of communicative competence that encompasses “knowledge of lexical items and of rules of morphology, syntax, sentence grammar semantics, and phonology” (Canale and Swain, 1980, p.29).

2.      Discourse competence is the complement of grammatical competence in many ways. It is the ability we have to connect sentences in stretches of discourse  and to form a meaningful whole out of a series of utterances.

3.      Sociolinguistic competence is the knowledge of the sociocultural rules of language and of discourse. This type of competence requires an understanding of the social context in which language is used: the roles of the participants, the information they share, and the function of the interaction.

4.      Strategic competence is a construct that is exceedingly complex. It is the competence underlying our ability to make repairs, to cope with imperfect knowledge, and to sustain communication through “paraphrase, circumlocution, repetition, hesitation, avoidance, and guessing, as well as shifts in register and style”.

Lyle Bachman places grammatical and discourse competence under one node, which he appropriately calls organizational competence, all those rules and systems that dictate what we can do with the forms of language, whether they be sentence level rules (grammar) or rules that govern how we string sentence together (discourse).