Historical Overview of Communicative Grammar and Competence

Historical Overview of the Development of the Notion of Communicative Grammar

Different writers have used this term in different ways:

• Chomsky: According to him, there is a difference between competence (knowledge of a language system needed for scientific investigation) and performance (ability to perform the language). He gives two definitions of competence: weak (not related to usage and ability) and strong (related to usage and ability). This is far from true.
• Dell Hymes: He criticizes Chomsky's competence for being too narrow a concept, leaving performance as a dustbin. He added other types of competences: pragmatic (knowledge of conditions and manner of appropriate use) and differential (differences among individuals). Hymes extended the notion of competence from knowledge of grammar to speaking as a whole, incorporating a social dimension, since different people have different competences, thus introducing the notion of ability.
• Canale & Swain: They see, as well as Chomsky, "communicative competence" as consisting of grammatical competence plus sociolinguistic competence. They divide communicative competence into four subcomponents:
  • 1. Grammatical competence (purely linguistic aspects).
  • 2. Discourse competence (the ways in which individual sentences connect together).
  • 3. Sociolinguistic competence (sociocultural rules of language).
  • 4. Strategic competence (the type of knowledge which we need to sustain communication with someone).
• Halliday: He rejects the dichotomy of "competence and performance". He prefers to distinguish between what a speaker does and what they could do; in other words, he is interested in the idea of "potential". He talks about three stages:
  • 1. Behaviour potential (what the speaker can do).
  • 2. Meaning potential (what the speaker can mean).
  • 3. Linguistic potential (what the speaker can say).

Educational Tradition of the Term "Communicative Competence"

In the Field of Psychology

"Competence" is associated with skill and capability. There are different definitions of competence from the educational point of view, with two main perspectives:

• Cognitive: "Competence" is seen as a mental phenomenon distinct and separated from behaviour.
• Behavioural: Skills are the connections between knowledge and behaviour, and proficiency in skills is what is required for the manifestation of communicative competence.

Corder

He introduced the term "transitional competence" in an attempt to use the Chomskyan framework to shed light on what was systematic about the learner's language. However, the use of the term in the second language situation brings some difficulties, such as errors of competence and a process full of backslidings and regressions.

Stern

He seems to associate competence with proficiency. L2 competence or proficiency ranges from zero to native-like. For him, competence is dynamic and active, not mechanical and static. Foreign language users are likely to have competence to a different degree as well, which recalls Hymes's notion of "differential competence".