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Communicative competence

Broad internalized communicative knowledge From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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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]

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Origin

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.

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Applications

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]

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References

Bibliography

Further reading

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