Assignment 3 - Topics in Applied Linguistics
Name
: Dwi Iswahyuni
NIM
: 2201409028
Rombel
: 2 (403-404)
Communicative Competence
Communicative competence was the method appeared due to the thought that
language ability was not only about grammatical competence . While grammatical
competence only focused on how to produce grammatically correct sentences,
communicative competence focused how to use grammar and aspects of language
approppriately for different communicative purposes. This was a broader concept,
included knowing what to say and how to say it appropriately based on the situation,
the participants and their roles and intentions. According to Celce-Murcia, there are
various components of communicative competence and they are related each other.
The above pyramid shows the relations between the components of communicative
competence. This is a pyramid enclosing a circle, surrounded by another circle. The circle
inside the pyramid is discourse competence, the core or central competence. The three points
of the triangle are the top-down sociocultural competence and the bottom-up linguistic
competence and actional competence. The arrows indicate that the various components are
constantly interacting with each other and the discourse component. This construct thus
placed the discourse component in a central position where the lexico-grammatical resources,
the actional organizing skills, and the sociocultural context all come together and shape the
discourse. The circle surrounding the pyramid is strategic competence, an available inventory
of communicative, cognitive, and metacognitive strategies that allow a skilled interlocutor to
negotiate meanings, resolve ambiguities, and to compensate for deficiencies in any of the
other competencies.
1. Sociocultural Competence
This refers to the speaker’s pragmatic knowledge. Besides, it includes knowledge
of language variation with reference to sociocultural norms of the target language. CelceMurcia et al. (1995: 23–24) describe several sociocultural variables, three of which are
most crucial in terms of the current model. They are:
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Social contextual factors: the participants’ age, gender, status, social distance and
their relations to each other.
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Stylistic appropriateness: politeness strategies, a sense of genres and registers.
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Cultural factors: background knowledge of the target language group, major
dialects/regional differences, and cross cultural awareness.
2. Discourse Competence
Discourse competence refers to the selection, sequencing, and arrangement of
words, structures, and utterances to achieve a unified spoken message. Celce-Murcia et
al. (1995: 13–15) describe several sub-areas of discourse competence, four of which are
most important with regard to the current model:
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Cohesion: conventions regarding use of reference (anaphora/cataphora), substitution/
ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical chains (i.e. Halliday and Hasan l976).
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Deixis: situational grounding achieved through use of personal pronouns, spatial
terms (here/there; this/that), temporal terms (now/then; before/after), and textual
reference (e.g. the following table, the figure above).
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Coherence: expressing purpose/intent through appropriate content schemata,
managing old and new information, maintaining temporal continuity and other
organizational schemata through conventionally recognized means.
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Generic structure: formal schemata that allow the user to identify an oral discourse
segment as a conversation, narrative, interview, service encounter, report, lecture,
sermon, etc.
3. Linguistic Competence
Linguistic competence includes four types of knowledge:
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Phonological: includes both segmentals (vowels, consonants, syllable types) and
suprasegmentals prominence/stress, intonation, and rhythm).
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Lexical: knowledge of both content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) and unction
words (pronouns, determiners, prepositions, verbal auxiliaries, etc.).
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Morphological: parts of speech, grammatical inflections, productive derivational
processes.
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Syntactic: constituent/phrase structure, word order (both canonical and marked), basic
sentence types, modification, coordination, subordination, embedding.
4. Formulaic Competence
This competence is the counterbalance to linguistic competence. It refers to those
fixed and prefabricated chunks of language that speakers use heavily in everyday
interactions. It had been largely ignored prior to seminal work by Pawley and Syder
(l983), Pawley (1992), and Nattinger and DeCarrico (l992), whose work brought this
domain to general attention.
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Routines: fixed phrases like of course, all of a sudden and formulaic chunks like How
do you do? I’m fine, thanks; how are you?
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Collocations: verb-object: spend money, play the piano adverbadjective: statistically
significant, mutually intelligible adjective-noun: tall building, legible handwriting
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Idioms: e.g., to kick the bucket = to die; to get the ax = to be fired/terminated
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Lexical frames: e.g., I’m looking for ______________. See you (later/tomorrow/ next
week, etc)
5. Interactional Competence
This competence has at least three sub-components relevant to the current model:
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Actional competence: knowledge of how to perform common speech acts and speech
act sets in the target language involving interactions such as information exchanges,
interpersonal exchanges, expression of opinions and feelings, problems (complaining,
apologizing, etc.), future scenarios (hopes, goals, predictions, etc.)
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Conversational competence: inherent to the turn-taking system in conversation
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Non-verbal/paralinguistic competence
6. Strategic Competence
According to Celce-Murcia, the communication strategies consist of achievement,
stalling, self-monitoring, interacting, and social. Strategies for language learning and use
are “specific behaviors or thought processes that students use to enhance their own L2
learning ” (according to Oxford (2001: 362)). Those behaviors encompass either
learning strategies or communication strategies. In addition, three most important things
related to this competence, include cognitive, metacognitive, and memory-related.