COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE AND COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING CRITICAL ANALYSIS II

Communicative approach to language teaching derives from a theory of language as communication. The goal of language teaching is to develop in learners what Hymes (1972) referred to as communicative competence, as opposed to Chomsky theory of competence (Linguistic competence vs. Performance).  Hymes consider necessary the difference between linguistic competence who take cares of the production and comprehension of the correct grammatically sentence and communicative competence take cares of the production and comprehension of appropriate sentences used on determine situation.  Community Competence as he defines it is knowledge of the rules for understanding and producing both the referential and social meaning of language.

Winddowson’s concept is that children’s can learn to talk and speck to whom and in what manner at the same time they acquire knowledge of grammatical rules.  He suggests that the classroom presentation must ensure the acquisition of both kinds of competency providing linguistic and communicative context.

Canale and Swain maintain that there are rules of language use that would be useless without rules of grammar.  They identified that at some point prior the final selection grammatical forms must be screened:  1) grammatical complexity; 2)  transparency with respect to the communicative function of the sentence; 3) generalizability to other communicative functions; 4)  the role of a given form in facilitating acquisition of another form; 5) acceptability in terms of perceptual strategies; and 6) degree of markedness in terms of social geographical dialects.

In the application of concept Rivers proposes methodological distinction between skill getting and skill using activities.  With skill getting the learners have the opportunity to practice separately and with skill using activities they can associate with learned elements (Rivers 1972).  Rivers point that rarely these activities passes beyond pseudo communication.

These concepts are hard to understand and apply, but the benefits in the student language are excellent.