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Communicative competence

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The concept of communicative competence, as developed in linguistics, originated in response to perceived inadequacy of the notion of linguistic competence. That is, communicative competence encompasses a language user's grammatical knowledge of syntax, morphology, phonology and the like, but reconceives this knowledge as a functional, social understanding of how and when to use utterances appropriately.

Communicative language teaching is a pedagogical application of communicative competence.[1]

The understanding of communicative competence has been influenced by the field of pragmatics and the philosophy of language, including work on speech acts.[2]

Origin

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The term was coined by Dell Hymes in 1966,[3] reacting against the perceived inadequacy of Noam Chomsky's (1965) distinction between linguistic competence and performance.[4] To address Chomsky's abstract notion of competence, Hymes undertook ethnographic exploration of communicative competence that included "communicative form and function in integral relation to each other".[5] The approach pioneered by Hymes is now known as the ethnography of communication.

Applications

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The notion of communicative competence is one of the theories that underlies the communicative approach to foreign language teaching.[5] At least three core models exist. The first and most widely used is Canale and Swain's model[6] and the later iteration by Canale.[7] In a second model, sociocultural content is more precisely specified by Celce-Murcia, Dornyei, and Thurrell in 1995. For their part, they saw communicative competence as including linguistic competence, strategic competence, sociocultural competence, actional competence, and discourse competence.[8] A third model widely in use in federal language training in Canada is Bachman and Palmer's model.[9]

References

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  1. ^ Savignon, Sandra J. (2017). "Communicative Competence". In Hossein, Nassasji (ed.). The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 1–7. doi:10.1002/9781118784235.eelt0047. ISBN 9781118784228.
  2. ^ Hymes 1964.
  3. ^ Hymes 1966.
  4. ^ Chomsky 1965.
  5. ^ a b Leung 2005.
  6. ^ Canale & Swain 1980.
  7. ^ Canale 1983.
  8. ^ Celce-Murcia, Dornyei & Thurrell 1995.
  9. ^ Bachman & Palmer 2010.

Bibliography

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Further reading

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  • Hymes, Dell (1972). "On communicative competence". In Pride, J.B.; Holmes, J. (eds.). Sociolinguistics: Selected Readings. Harmondsworth: Penguin. pp. 269–293. ISBN 978-014080665-6.