The
major goal of taking a language course is to enable students to develop
communicative competence. The term “communicative competence” was first coined
by Dell Hymes (1967, 1972) and his colleagues (anthropological linguists,
sociolinguists, and functional linguist), who argued that language competence
consist not only of Chomsky’s (1957, 1965) grammatical competence but also of
sociolinguistic or pragmatic competence, which covers all situated aspects of
language use and related issues of appropriacy: the speaker (and, if different,
the original author), the addressee(s), the messege, the setting oe event, the
activity, the register, and so forth.
Hymes’
term “communicative competence” was taken up by those language methodologist
who contributed to development of Communicative language Teaching (e.g,
Wilkins,1976:Widdowson,1978) However, a pedagogical framework based explicitly
on the notion of communicate competence was first proposed by Canale and
Swain (1980) and Canale (1983),4 who argued that communicative competence could
be described as consisting od at least four components :
1.
Linguistic or grammatical competence, which consist of the basic elements of
communication sentence patterns, morphological infections, lexical resources,
and phonological or ortnographic systems.
2.
Sociolinguistic competence, which consist of the social and cultural knowledge
required to use language appropriately with reference to formality, politeness,
and other contextually defined choices.
3.
Discouse competence, which consist the section sequencing and arrangement of
words, structures, and sentences/utterances to achieve a unified spoken or
written whole with reference to a particular message and context
4.
Strategies competence, which includes the strategies and procedures relevant to
language learning, language processing, and language production. It activates
knowledge of the other competences and helps sets compensate for gaps or
deficiencies in knowledge when they communicate.
In
our option, the core or central competency in the Canale and Swain framework is
discourse competence since this is where everything else comes together: It is
in discourse and through discourse that all of the other comperencies are
realized. And it is in discourse and through discourse that the manifestation
of the other competencies can best be observed, research and assessed.
