Communicative Language Ability

Communicative Language Ability

• Communicative language ability includes the competence of language and the capacity for implementing this competence.

Language Proficiency and Communicative Competence

• Early Models (Lado): distinguish skills (reading, speaking) from components of knowledge (grammar, vocabulary)

• Later Models• Halliday (1976): language functions• Dijk (1971): delineation of the relationship betwee

n text and contest• Hymes (1972): socialcultural factors in the speech

situation• Recognition of the dynamic interaction between th

e context and the discourse

Framework of Communicative Language Ability

• Three components:• Language competence: specific knowledge of com

ponents used in communication• Strategic competence: mental capacity for implem

enting the components of language competence• Psychophysiological mechanisms: neurological an

d psychological process in the actual execution of language as a physical phenomenon.

Framework of Communicative Language Ability

Framework of Communicative Language Ability

• Attempts to prove the validity of the components have not been successful.

• Allen (1983) tried to measure grammatical competence (morphology and syntax) , discourse competence (cohesion and coherence) and sociolingistic competence (sensitivity to register), failed to support the factorial distinctness of these particular components.

Framework of Communicative Language Ability

• Bachman (1982): grammatical and pragmatic competence are closely associated with each other, while sociolinguistic competences are distinct.

Framework of Communicative Language Ability

Language Competence

• Organizational competence Grammatical competence Vocabulary / Morphology / Syntax Phonology/Graphology

Textual Competence Coherence Rhetoric Organization

Language Competence

• Pragmatic Competence Illocutionary competence ideational / manipulative / heuristic / ima

ginative Sociolinguistic competence sensitivity to dialect / register / naturalness

/ cultural references

Language Competence

• Grammatical Competence• Knowledge of vocabulary, morphology, syntax,

phonology and graphology These competences govern the choice of words to

express specific significations, their forms, their arrangement in utterances to express propositions, and their physical realizations.

Textual Competence • Knowledge of the conventions for joining utterances to

gether to form a text• Convention (Halliday): semantic relationships such as r

eferences, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion

• Convention (Grice): given and new information• Conventions of rhetorical organization: narration, descri

ption, comparison, classification, process analysis.• Conventions of conversational language: establishing,

maintaining, terminating conversations, attention getting, topic nomination, topic development and conversation maintenance.

Pragmatic Competence • Organizational competence: the relationship

s among signs and their referents.• Pragmatic competence: the relationships bet

ween the language users and the context of communication, utterance and the acts or functions that speakers intend to perform through these utterances.

• Van Dijk’s aspects of pragmatics

Pragmatic Competence • The examination of the pragmatic

conditions that whether or not a given utterance is acceptable to other users of the language as an act, or the performance of an intended function

• The characterization of the conditions that determine which utterances are successful in which situations.

Language Functions of Illocutionary Competence

• Ideational function: we express meaning in terms of our experience of the real world.

• Manipulative function: the primary purpose is to affect the world around us.

• Heuristic function: extend our knowledge of the world around us.

• Imaginative function: create or extend our own environment for humorous or esthetic purposes, where the value derives from the way in which the language itself is used.

Sociolinguistic Competence • Appropriateness of these functions and their

varieties in language use context• Sensitivity to differences in dialect or

variety• Sensitivity to differences in register• Sensitivity to naturalness• Ability to interpret cultural references and

figures of speech

Strategic Competence • Interactional definition (Tarone: 1981): th

e mutual attempt by two interlocutors to agree on a meaning in situations where the requisite meaning structures do not seem to be shared. Problem: some communicative language use involves only one individual.

• Canale and Swain (1980): the definition of strategic competence includes both the compensatory characteristic and enhancement characteristic.

Psycholinguistic Description of Strategies • Faerch and Kasper (1983): speech productio

n includes a planning phase and an execution phase.

• Planning phrase: communicative goals and planning process

Psycholinguistic Description of Strategies • Communicative goals: an actional element associa

ted with speech acts, an modal element associated with the role relationship and a prepositional element associated with the content of the communicative event.

• Planning process: interaction of three components—the communicative goal, the communicative resources and the assessment of the communicative situation.

• Execution phase: neurological and physiological processes of implementation of the plan.

Bachman’s strategic competence

• Assessment component• Planning component• Execution component

Assessment Component

• Identify the information• Determine what language competencies are

at our disposal• Ascertain the abilities and knowledge that

are shared by our interlocutors• Following the communication attempt,

evaluate the extent to which the communicative goal has been achieved.

Planning Component

• The planning component retrieves relevant items from language competence and formulates a plan whose realization is expected to achieve the communicative goal.

Execution Component

• The execution component draws on the relevant psychophysiological mechanisms to implement the plan in the modality and channel appropriate to the communicative goal and the context.