Communicative Competence

Group 2
Dyah Nuraini
Emilia Nur Febriantini
Meti Wismarini

                                     Communicative Competence

                                  
                           What is communicative competence itself?

Communicative Competence is a construct that has been a topic of interest for at least for decaades, recent trends have put less emphasis on structural and characteristics of communication  and more on the myriad social, cultural, and pragmatic implications of what it means to communicate in a second language. This new wave of interest brings social constructivist perspectives into central focus and draws our attention to language as interactive communication among individuals, each with a sociocultural identity; Researcher are looking at discourse, interaction, pragmatics and negotiation, among other things. Foreign language learning is viewed not just as a potentially predictable developmental process but also as the creation of meaning through interpersonal negotiation among learners. Communicative competence became a household phrase in SLA.

Communicative competence is relative, not absolute, and depends on the cooperation of all the participants involved. Interpersonal construct that can be examined only be means of the overt performance of two or more individuals in the process of communications.  In the 1970s, research on CC distinguished between linguistic and communicative competence. James Cummins (1980, 1979) proposed a distinction between cognitive/academic language proficiency (CALP) and basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS). 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. BICS, on the other hand, is the communicative capacity that all children acquire in other to be able to function in daily interpersonal exchanges. A good share classroom, school-oriented language is context reduced, while face to face communication with people is context embedded.

Four different components, or subcategories, made up the construct of CC are:

1.       Grammatical competence is that aspect of CC that encompasses “knowledge of lexical items and of rules of morphology, syntax, sentence-grammar semantics, and phonology.”

2.       Discourse competence as complement of grammatical competence in many ways.

3.       Sociolinguistic competence is knowledge of the sociocultural rules of language and of discourse.

4.       Strategic competence as a construct that is exceedingly complex.

Strategic competence occupies a special place in an understanding of communication. Actually, definitions of strategic competence that are limited to the notion of “compensatory strategies” fall short of encompassing the full spectrum of the construct. Swain (1984, p.189) said the earlier notion of strategic competence to include “communication strategies that may be called into action either to enhance the effectiveness of communication or to composite for breakdowns.”  In fact, strategic competence is the way we manipulate language in order to meet communicative goals. A friend persuades you to do something extraordinary because he or she has mustered communicative strategies for the occasion. 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 is called organizational communication. Here, strategic competence almost serves an “executive” function of making the final “decision,” among many possible options, on wording, phrasing, and other productive and receptive means for negotiating meaning.