XXXVIII NATIONAL ASOCOPI CONGRESS
UNDERSTANDING COMPETENCES
Fernando Silva , UPTC
1. Opening thoughts:
a. The difference between a knowledge-oriented curriculum and a competencyoriented curriculum is that in one case the teacher grows fatter, and in the other the
student grows wiser (and the teacher doesn’t necessarily get leaner). (Learning to be,
Learning to do)
b. The second question I should ask myself in planning a course unit is not about
how I should teach it, but about how my student will be a better person from trying
to learn it, even if he doesn’t. The answer may not be about his learning it, but about
what he learned from trying to learn it, even if he didn’t. (Learning to learn, learning
to live together)
c. "La ley 115 hace énfasis en una concepción del currículo centrado en procesos y
competencias, con carácter flexible, participativo y abierto que propende por el
desarrollo integral de las personas." (Bula en MEN, Lineamientos Idioma
Extranjeros).
2. The Genesis of competenciology
a. Chomsky: competence vs. performance
b. Hymes: linguistic competence vs. communicative competence
c. Canale –Swaine: communicative competence= formal + sociolinguistic + strategic
d. Bachman : organizational (grammatical + textual) + pragmatical (illocutionary +
sociolinguistical)
3. Unsolved mysteries
Well and good for native speakeer’s language análisis
Not good enough to analyse learner’s language
"Cuando los alumnos empiezan el aprendizaje de una lengua extranjera ... poseen ya
alguna competencia comunicativa en su lengua materna. De lo que se trata, por tanto, en
un currículo de idiomas extranjeros es de promover esta competencia para comunicarse
en otras lenguas, dentro de sus propias limitaciones, tal como ya lo saben hacer en su
lengua materna. " (MEN LIE ).
4. Proposition
Foreign language learning is therefore a combination of “known elements” that pertain
to an already acquired communicative competency (high level) in the mother tongue
plus “new elements” (low level) that pertain to the CODE of the target language, plus,
perhaps, new elements that refer to the culture of the target language.
The tasks to be boarded then fall at different levels that could be mapped more or less as
follows:
Communicative competence in the target language (final objective)
Word level
Lesical competency
Meanint rules:
Lexical, phonetical, morphological,
graphemic
Sentence level
Syntatcital or textual
competency
Grouping rules
(syntax)
Discourse level
Pragmatic or illocutionary
competency
Interpretive rules
5. Lexical issues
Can we really postpone intentional lexical growth?
Lexical growth has been postponed in all methodological proposals since the 1950’s on
account of its inherent boredom.
Lexical growth has been let go at random. Students are supposed to take care of it on
their own. Often lexical knowledge is assumed, but not boarded. In the end, students
don’t take care of it, students are happy on a lower load, but competency is delayed.
Lexical growth must be brought to the foreground, even at the cost of making students
learn word lists.
A significant portion of the language teaching failure with “formal methods” (including
communicative approaches) can be attributed to the resistance of teachers and theorists
to make students go through the pain of increasing their vocabulary in explicit ways.
Irony: Native speakers of a language are often told that they will be socially
more successful if they increase their word power. Why do we put it off for
learners of a second language?
6. Textual items
The basic meaning mechanism of all human languages is grouping words of different
categories into meaningful propositions. Basically an agent, an action, and one or more
recipients of circumnstances.
The boy
ran
into the woods.
This is mapped out in linguistic terms as a subject, a verb and a complement. Any
speaker of any language is intuitively familiar with this principle, but most students of a
foreign language will have to be made aware of it and of how it works in the target
language. Most other rules of grammar are subsidiary to this main paradigm, and may
be grossly distracting and unnecessary in the task of developing textual competency.
Some of them the L2 student will never learn to use, most of them will fall in place
through life experience.
Universal language matrix:
Subject
Verb
Complement
7. Discoursal issues
Discourse refers to how we interpret what other people say, which rather usually means
how we twist what the other people say to make the most of it to our benefit. One thing
is the communicative intention of the speaker-writer (which is usually naïve and well
intended, frank, open, almost blunt), and a very different thing is how we are always
trying to make the speaker step on a banana peeling. In real life, language use is a tugof-war.
Disccoursal competency then relies on the studfent learning to interpret message cues
and conributing his own intepretation to finaliza the message. Discoursla competency is
no longer mereley a matter of “knowing the grammar well”, but of learning to interact
with others in the context of surrounding information, body language, intonation, and
other non-traditional message clues.
8. Genders
For pedagogical purposes a definition of final achievements is far from satsifactory
because it doesn’t allow for stages of progression, and hence, for curricular design.
So COMPETENCE in a given area will be defined as the ability to solve problems in
that area. Mathematical competence is the ability to solve mathematicla problems.
Lexical competence is the ability to solve lexical problems.
An added value of this definition is that the course designer can SELECT THE TYPE
AND DIFFICULTY OF THE PROBLEMS TO BE SOVLED AT ANY PARTICULAR
LEVEL ALONG THE STUDENT’S CAREER.
For example “descriptive competence” is the ability to solve problemas in the realm of
description. “Narrative competence” is the ability to solve problems in the realm of
narration. These “problems” can be further broken down into subcategories thus
allowing for a progressive sequence of problems from the elementary to the advanced.
A third “gender” of language in addition to “description” and “narration” would be
“explication” that includes a number of subfunctions such as argumentation, instruction
and extended description, as in theoretical explanations.
There seems to be a prgression in difficulty starting at description and on up to narration
and explication. Each higher stge allows for growing lexical and syntatcical
progression.
9. Standards
We will define standards as the degree of approximation of the behavior of the learner
to the behavior of the native speaker. A very low standard is one that is very distant
from the natie speaker’s behavior in lexical adequacy, oral fluency and grammaticality.
A high standard is one that is very close to the native speaker’s lexical adequacy, oral
fluency and grammaticality.
Lexcial fluency engenders the possibility of “holding the floor” for a longer time. At the
upper end, a Native speaker can hold the floor for several minutes continuously without
being prompted. At the lower end, the absolute beginner can at best utter a few words
before he “runs out of gas”. Hence lenght of time in holding the floor becomes an
indicator of the speaker’s standard.
Oral fluency is the aibility to connect words with one another so that they don’t sound
“broken”, and the resulting ability of producing a higher number of sentences in a given
time unit. A native speaker sepaking about a well known topic, such as a lecturer, can
speak at about 10 to 15 sentences per minute. A beginner may go as low as one or fewer
sentences in a minute. A learner speaking at about 8 sentences per minute “sounds”
rather native. A learner speaking at one or two sentences per minute definitely sounds ...
like a beginner. Hence the speed of delivery, while being a totally unacceptable practice
in ordinary language intercourse, is a reasonable dependable standard of acceptable
language use.
Grammaticality is also a fine, reserach-related standard. A native speaker will make ery
few serious grammatical mistakes, perjaps in the region of 3%, that is, about three
sentences out of one hundred will have some kind of grammar mistake. A beginner
learner will make manymistakes, perhaps as many, or more, than at least one mistake in
every single sentence he utters. Alearner who can survive a three mintue talk with about
80% accuracy “sounds” rather native.
Hence these three variables of use of time, flueny and grammaticality, while
horrendously artificial (everything in pedagogy is necessariily artificial), are fine
indicators of advance in language behavior. A standard of 8/8/80 from the very
beginning will yield after a very short time a reasonable standard, which should be
maintained during life (there has to be no significant variation after that), while topical
growth and syntactical sophistication will account for most of the growth in ensuing
language training.
This proposal is merely experimental and is ofered “as is” to any colleague who wants
to try it. It claims no validity beyond experimental purposes, but it has shown to be
consistent and effective in the settings where it has been used. It holds well for all levels
of lexical growth, gender and syntactic sophistication.