Group 3

Name :  Nur Faizah

            Hasan Zainuddin

            Nurul Ihsan

Communicative Competence

Chapter 7, on sociocultural issues in second language acquisition, and this one are closely linked.

DEFINING COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE

The term communicative competence (CC) was coined by Dell Hymes (1972, 1967), a sociolinguist who was convinced that Chomsky`s (1965) notion of competence (see chapter 2) was too limited.

The first two subcategories reflected the use of the linguistic system itself; the last two defined the functional aspects of communication.

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

2.      The second subcategory is discourse competence, the complement of grammatical competence in many ways.

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

4.      The fourth subcategory is strategic competence, 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. Canale and Swain`s (1980) model of CC has undergone some other modifications over the years. These newer views are perhaps best captured in Lyle Bachman`s (1990) schematization of what he simply calls “language competence” as shown in figure 8.1.