Communicative Competence Research Paper

1. From Whence Comes Communicative Competence?

In the mid-to-late 1960s, revolution was brewing in American linguistics. Noam Chomsky was busy sweeping away the structuralist approach to linguistics, which had resulted in catalogs of observations that overemphasized the diversity of languages, and, he felt, obscured the essential similarity between languages. After all, he reasoned, learning one’s language (the singular ‘language’ is deliberately chosen here) is a natural human capacity; whatever allows young children to learn Navajo or French or Swahili, must, at root, be the same. There must be some underlying language capacity, common to all humans, which, when combined with experience of particular languages, results in a system of linguistic knowledge for those languages. Chomsky deliberately idealized the knowledge he was trying to describe, assuming for the sake of argument (and scientific advance) that all speakers of a language shared the same knowledge.

From these early speculations grew the notions of competence and performance (Chomsky 1965). Competence describes the knowledge that a speaker has of his or her language, the knowledge which underlies the production and comprehension of that language. Importantly, for Chomsky, competence is not, and has never been, an evaluative term. He uses it instead of the term ‘knowledge’ to avoid suggestions that knowledge of language is, or might be, conscious, when in fact knowledge of language is largely tacit and unconscious. So, his use of competence is not the ordinary use of the term, and must not be interpreted as contrastable with incompetent on some evaluative scale. Chomsky further argued that language behavior, actual utterances coming out of the mouths of speakers and being understood by hearers— performance—was but a poor reflection of underlying competence, beset as it could be by slips of the tongue, alcohol or novocaine induced slurring, and other physical impediments of various kinds. Thus, for Chomsky, the competence vs. performance distinction was very unevenly balanced, with all the richness and interest on the competence side, and just behavioral mishaps on the other.

This characterization incensed sociolinguist Dell Hymes, who was very interested in how young bilingual children choose which language to use and when, and how all speakers modify their language(s) depending upon the context in which they are using them. He had been gradually evolving a way of looking at language in use which he called the ‘ethnography of communication,’ and which focused on the social meanings created and negotiated between people in communication. He emphasized the shortcomings of most of the sociolinguistics of the time which focused on statistical analyses of large populations, and argued for a focus on the blow-by-blow organization of interpersonal communication. Even though Chomsky was similarly rejecting the impersonal cataloging of linguistic facts, and was putting the focus on the task of the individual as a learner of any humanly possible language, Hymes felt that Chomsky’s idealization of the language capacity as something possessed by a monolingual, and stripped of all the variation he observed in the behavior of even a single individual moving among different contexts of use made a mockery of what language was all about for him. Hymes was not prepared to follow Chomsky down a path which led to linguistics being seen as part of cognitive science; he was firmly committed to language as a social and behavioral phenomenon.

In reaction to Chomsky’s coinage of the term competence, therefore, Hymes created the term ‘communicative competence’ which he intended to subsume and extend Chomsky’s notion. The most celebrated quotation from Hymes is

A child capable of any and all grammatical utterances, but not knowing which to use, not knowing even when to talk and when to stop, would be a cultural monstrosity. (Hymes 1967, p. 16)

He thus argues that the fundamental problem is

to discover the underlying communicative competence that enables members of a community to use and interpret the use of language, and to provide a formal description that is a theory of that competence. (Hymes 1967, pp. 17, 18)

It is worth noting that the term was ‘in the air’ at the time. Not only was it beginning to be used in the field of second and foreign language teaching, but Campbell and Wales (1970) used it in connection with language acquisition. They are usually credited as having coined the term independently, although Hymes (1992) suggests that they might have indirectly got it from him by talking to the people he was talking to at the time.

2. Hymes’ Communicative Competence

Hymes’ notion of communicative competence was born out of a belief that acts of speech, such as promising or asserting or denying are produced and understood within the context of particular ‘speech events,’ such as conversations, lectures, or marriages, themselves occurring within particular speech situations within a speech community. The particular value that a speech act has is determined by the layers of context within which it is embedded. Importantly, the context includes not just objective factors such as who is speaking, where, and when, but subjective factors, such as what participants in a speech event believe themselves to be doing, and how they ‘take’ what is said to them. These speaker hearer beliefs vary both individually and culturally, and cannot be ignored when trying to understand what a speaker means by an utterance. Cultures vary, for example, in how they view the loquacious individual, in the extent to which information is power, and to what status they accord the language of infants. Factors such as these significantly affect the microsociolinguistic world of interpersonal communication. Thus, for Hymes, it was fundamentally important that such factors be properly integrated into linguistics and that ‘socio-linguistics’ come to be synonymous with ‘linguistics.’ Since then, communicative competence has come to cover all aspects of language use, including text cohesion and coherence, rhetorical organization, speech act organization, register variation, dialect variation, and so on.

3. Reactions And Counter-Reactions

The term communicative competence was accepted with alacrity by many other influential sociolinguists, including John Gumperz, Susan Ervin-Tripp, and Michael Halliday. The field of sociolinguistics sustained rapid advances as a result, seeing itself increasingly at loggerheads with formal linguists, which retained its focus on sentence-level grammatical issues. However, Chomsky was not unaffected by the firestorm. In his book Rules and Representations (1980) Chomsky refers to ‘pragmatic competence,’ and defines it as follows.

Furthermore, the person who knows a language knows the conditions under which it is appropriate to use a sentence, knows what purposes can be furthered by appropriate use of a sentence under given social conditions. For purposes of inquiry and exposition, we may proceed to distinguish ‘grammatical competence’ from ‘pragmatic competence,’ restricting the first to knowledge of form and meaning and the second to conditions and manner of appropriate use, in conformity with various purposes. (Chomsky 1980, p. 224)

It is clear that, although he is not using the term communicative competence, he has many, if not most, of the key elements of it. Moreover, he situates ‘pragmatic competence’ in relation to ‘performance’:

Theories of grammatical and pragmatic competence must find their place in a theory of performance that takes into account the structure of memory, our mode of organizing experience, and so on. (Chomsky 1980, p. 225)

This quotation is important, because when Chomsky first proposed the ‘competence’ vs. ‘performance’ distinction, sociolinguists could see that their concerns did not fit into his restricted notion of competence, which meant that if they were anywhere, they must be part of what was at the time a very impoverished notion of ‘performance’ (slips of the tongue, etc., see above). So many writers, trying to find a place for communicative competence have seen it as part of a theory of ‘performance,’ and argued for it as such, despite the clear division Chomsky makes in the quotation above. The result is an ambiguity in the literature between communicative competence as knowledge and communicative competence as ability or skill for performance. This has meant that the term has sometimes been interpreted very cognitively, and at others very behaviorally, and at yet others, systematically ambiguously.

4. Communicative Competence As Ability Skill

Despite the originally stated intention to make communicative competence match ‘competence’ as a for-mal description of what a person who knows a language knows, many writers have used the term in an evaluative sense in which various kinds of communicative competence are seen as being on continua from incompetence to competence. For example, in educational circles, communicative competence has often been used as one measure of a learner’s success. The work of Basil Bernstein, for example, has usually been seen as suggesting that children from certain kinds of background are likely to be, in fact, communicatively incompetent in the terms defined by school success (Bernstein 1990). Children who cannot use the language in the ways expected by the school suffer from the effects of this incompetence. Similarly, in work by Cummins (1984) and others, bilingual children have been claimed to be communicatively in-competent to the point of being labeled semilingual because their ability to use each of their languages satisfies native speakers of neither language, who find them communicatively ‘incompetent’ in both languages.

In second language acquisition studies (see below) concerns with making second language learners competent users of the language have driven a range of studies under the umbrella of communicative competence. In all these sub-fields (and there are many others), the evaluative sense of communicative competence plays the main role. It is worth asking whether the ambiguity in the term’s use is problematic or not. The answer is likely to depend more than anything on one’s philosophical stance with respect to the nature of knowledge. Is knowledge something represented, something separate from behavior, or is knowledge simply the term we give to the capacity to act? This in turn depends on one’s approach to the division between cognitive science on the one hand, and social and behavioral science on the other. For those who wish to see the two fields come together, the ambiguity of the term, straddling as it does the border between them is perhaps to be encouraged. For those, however, for whom cognitive science is a fundamentally different enterprise, in which behavior is the outward manifestation of knowledge (whether represented declaratively or through connectionist networking), the issue is more fundamental.

5. Communicative Competence In Language Acquisition

A range of different fields have used, and developed, the communicative competence notion. Two will be discussed briefly here: the sub-fields of first-language acquisition and of second-language acquisition.

In first-language acquisition, studies on very early communication prior to the emergence of real language (at a point where gestures and single ‘words’ are all the child has at his or her disposal) were particularly popular in the 1970s, and still continue in work as diverse as that trying to determine whether chimps can be said to have a communicative competence or that which aims to discover what kind of communicative system deaf children will invent if they are not presented with an acquirable language. Work with older children has focused, and continues to focus on how children develop the range of means to express speech acts, how they choose between styles of speech, how they switch between languages and dialects, and so on (cf. Romaine 1984, which also has an interesting discussion of the concept of communicative competence). There are also those interested in children who for one reason or another appear to have a relatively intact ability to communicate in the face of severe disorders to the linguistic system, and in those who have the reverse pathology, being capable of producing correctly structured utterances, but with severely disordered abilities to use language appropriately. These dissociations, if they truly exist (and current debates show divided opinion here), raise a range of epistemological questions about the status of linguistic competence in relation to pragmatic or communicative competence. General introductions to child language development, covering the issues listed above among many others can be found in Foster-Cohen (1990, 1999).

Considerable energy has been put into trying to model communicative competence correctly within the field of second language testing and second language acquisition. For language testers, interested in the evaluation of communicative competence (used evaluatively, of course), it is vital that all the parts of the notion be laid out and defined, so that testers can be sure that they know what they are testing. Most discussions in this context make reference to Hymes’ work, although the initial use of the term communicative competence in this context appears to have been independent of him. At first, communicative competence for language teachers meant simply an ability to get a message across in the target language, to be capable of ‘spontaneous expression.’ However, when Hymes’ work became known, many language teachers adopted the more broadly sociolinguistic sense of the term, and argued that teaching the social meanings of second language expressions are as important as teaching the structures

Michael Canale and Merrill Swain are perhaps the best known for expanding the notion of communicative competence for those interested in second language acquisition in an article published in 1980. There they distinguish between ‘grammatical competence’ (syntax, morphology, lexis, semantics and morphology), ‘sociolinguistic competence,’ and ‘strategic competence.’ Sociolinguistic competence covers both sociocultural rules of how to use linguistic expressions appropriately, and rules of discourse, that is how to string utterances together appropriately to produce a contribution (written or spoken) that a native speaker would recognize as well-formed. Strategic competence covers both verbal and nonverbal communication strategies that allow a nonnative speaker to get over communication problems due to inadequacies in either grammatical or sociolinguistic competence, or due to performance limitations.

More recently, Lyle Bachmann (1990) has re-emphasized the dynamic nature of communicative ability. The negotiation of meaning between participants in an interaction, emphasized in sociolinguistics by Michael Halliday from the early 1970s and in language teaching by Sandra Savignon from the early 1980s, picks up on the idea of the ‘emergent properties of events’ noted by Hymes when the communicative competences of two individuals come in contact. Bachmann’s model overtly places performance mechanisms within communicative competence which he, of necessity, calls ‘communicative language ability,’ having given up the original competence vs. performance distinction with which Chomsky and Hymes began. Although designed for language teachers and testers, Bachmann’s discussion lays out particularly clearly the range of knowledge and abilities that a communicatively competent language user must control.

6. Communicative Competence And Pragmatic Competence Revisited

It was noted above that Chomsky’s definition of pragmatic competence bears strong resemblance to Hymes’ definition of communicative competence. However, it must not be forgotten that the perspectives of the two are still quite different. Whereas Hymes’ is interested in accounting for the diversity in language behavior, Chomsky is interested in the similarities across individuals, in discovering the universal proper-ties which make us human. A similar mindset can be seen among all those who are interested in pragmatic competence as an account of human understanding of communication. Sperber and Wilson, in their account of pragmatics known as ‘Relevance Theory’ (Sperber and Wilson, 1986, 1995), focus on the inferencing procedures that individuals use to interpret utterances in context. They view their enterprise as explicating a cognitive approach to communication, and can as such be seen as providing a theory of communicative competence in the Chomskyan sense, but not in the Hymesian sense.

However, this theory is entirely compatible with the range of facts which a sociolinguistic account of communicative competence sees itself as needing to account for. Just as grammatical theory has shown its capacity for accounting for cross-linguistic, cross-dialectal, and idiosyncratic features of languages, so a good theory of pragmatics should be able to show how human communication works across similarly diverse individuals. Gumperz (1997) calls for such a general theory when he invokes the work of Jurgen Habermas on communicative competence. Habermas is interested in ‘the universal conditions of possible under-standings’ between people, ultimately in the political and social realities created through communication; but Gumperz argues for a definition of communicative competence as

the knowledge of linguistic and related communicative conventions that speakers must have to initiate and sustain conversational involvement … Studies of communicative competence, therefore, must deal with linguistic signs at a level of generality which transcends the bounds of linguists’ grammatical systems and must concentrate on aspects of meaning or interpretation more general than that of sentence content. (Gumperz 1997, pp. 40, 41)

Sperber and Wilson would certainly agree. A concern for a general theory of human understanding, then, drives researchers from widely divergent backgrounds and training, and with significantly different assumptions.

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