Assignment 3 COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE

COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE

Discourse Competence

Discourse competence concerns the selection, sequencing and arrangement of words, structures, sentences and utterances to achieve a unified spoken or written text. There are many sub-areas that contribute to discourse competence, such as:

·         Cohesion

·         Deixis

·         Coherence

·         Generic structure

·         Conversational structure

Linguistic competence

 Linguistic competence is historically the most thoroughly discussed component of our model. It comprises the basic elements of communication: its systematic aspect (including meaning, word-building process) to linguistic competence, and lexical phrases to actional and discourse competence. Components of linguistic competence:

·         Syntax

·         Morphology

·         Lexicon

·         Phonology

·         Orthography

Actional competence

It defined as competence in conveying and understanding communicative intent. It matches actional intent with lngustic form based on the knowledge of an inventory of verbal schemata that carry illocutionary force. Actional competence is closely related to “interlanguage pragmatic” which has been defined as “the study of nonnative speakers’ use and acquisition of linguistic action patterns in a second language.”

Components of actional competence are:

•  Knowledge of language function: interpersonal exchange, information, opinion, feeling, suasion, problems, future scenarios.
• Knowledge of speech act sets.

Socio cultural competence

It refers to the speakers’ knowledge of how to express messages appropriately within the overall social and cultural context of communication, in accordance with the pragmatic factors related to variation in language use. In this case, language is not simply as a communication coding system, but also an integral part of individual’s identity and the most important channel os social organization. Raising socio cultural awareness is not an easy task, because socio cultural rules and normative patterns of expected or acceptable behavior have not yet been adequately analyzed and described. Social cultural variables are:

·         Social contextual factors

·         Stylistic appropriateness factors

·         Cultural factors

·         Non-verbal communicative factors

Strategic competence

It defined as knowledge of communication strategies and how to use them. Work on communication strategies has typically highlighted three functions of strategy use from three different perspectives:

a)      Psycholinguistic perspective

Communication strategies are also verbal plans used to overcome problems in reaching communicative goal.

b)      Interactional perspective

Communicative strategies involve appeals for help as well as other cooperative problem solving behaviors which occur after some problem has surfaced during the communication.

c)       Maintenance perspective

Communicative strategies are means of keeping the communication channel open in the face of communication difficulties and playing for time to think and to make speech plans.

Source:

Celce-muria, M., Dornyei, Z., & Thurrel,S. (1995). Communicative Competence: A Pedagogically Motivated Model with Content Specifications. Issues in Applied Linguistics. Retrieved from http://escholarship.ucop.edu/uc/item/2928w4zj 7 April 2012