Communicative Language Ability

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Communicative Language Ability
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Communicative Language Ability

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

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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
  between text and contest
• Hymes (1972) socialcultural factors in the
  speech situation
• Recognition of the dynamic interaction between
  the context and the discourse

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Framework of Communicative Language Ability

• Three components
• Language competence specific knowledge of
  components used in communication
• Strategic competence mental capacity for
  implementing the components of language
  competence
• Psychophysiological mechanisms neurological and
  psychological process in the actual execution of
  language as a physical phenomenon.

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Framework of Communicative Language Ability

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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.

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Framework of Communicative Language Ability

• Bachman (1982) grammatical and pragmatical
  competence are closely associated with each
  other, while sociolinistic competence are
  distinct.

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Framework of Communicative Language Ability

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Language Competence

• Organizational competence
• Grammatical competence
• Vocabulary / Morphology / Syntax
• Phonology/Graphology
• Textual Competence
• Coherence
• Rhetoric
• Organization

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Language Competence

• Pragmatic Competence
• Illocutionary competence
• ideational / manipulative / heuristic /
  imaginative
• Sociolinguistic competence
• sensitivity to dialect / register /
  naturalness / cultural references

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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.

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Textual Competence

• Knowledge of the conventions for joining
  utterances together to form a text
• Convention (Halliday) semantic relationships
  such as references, substitution, ellipsis,
  conjunction, and lexical cohesion
• Convention (Grice) given and new information
• Conventions Of rhetorical organization
  narration, description, comparison,
  classification, process analysis.
• Conventions of conversational language
  establishing, maintaining, terminating
  conversations, attention getting, topic
  nomination, topic development and conversation
  maintenance.

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Pragmatic Competence

• Organizational competence the relationships
  among signs and their referents.
• Pragmatic competence the relationships between
  the language users and the context of
  communication, utterance and the acts or
  functions that speakers intend to perform through
  these utterances.
• Van Dijks aspects of pragmatics

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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.

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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.

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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

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Strategic Competence

• Interactional definition (Tarone 1981) the
  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.

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Psycholinguistic Description of Strategies

• Faerch and Kasper (1983) speech production
  includes a planning phase and an execution phase.
• Planning phrase communicative goals and planning
  process

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Psycholinguistic Description of Strategies

• Communicative goals an actional element
  associated 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
  componentsthe communicative goal, the
  communicative resources and the assessment of the
  communicative situation.
• Execution phase neurological and physiological
  processes of implementation of the plan.

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Bachmans strategic competence

• Assessment component
• Planning component
• Execution component

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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.

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Planning Component

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

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Execution Component

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

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