To be able to discover the meanings of a text, however, someone should have sufficient communicative competence that is explained in the following sub-
chapter.
2.3 Communicative Competence
The basic need someone learns a language is for communication, i.e. for achieving communicative competence CC.
Hymes in 1971 suggested that CC covers two components:grammatical com-petence and appropriateness. What he means by appropriateness here is the
consideration of who is saying what to whom, in what circumstances and in what condition. The socioeconomic status of the encoder and decoder, age, topic,
context, channel, all these bear on the choices of codes, styles or registers to be used for communicating. An example of the importance of appropriateness is a
written note ‘Don’t be angry with me. I come will late today’. That note is grammatically correct, but when it is given by a subordinate to his boss it becomes
totally inappropriate. The interpersonal meaning does not work, here. That note cannot be given to a boss, it sounds rude. In other words, that note is
inappropriately used. Canale and Swain in 1980 elaborated the term appropriateness of Hymes
into the strategic competence and the sociocultural competence, which was elaborated by Canale himself in 1983 in this definition of CC: ‘communicative
competence is the underlying system of knowledge and skill required for communication’ Canale, 1983 as cited in Celce-Murcia, 1995:7 .
According to Canale, CC consists of grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, and strategic competence. The
grammatical compe-tence includes vocabulary, rules of words and sentence formation, linguistic semantics, pronunciation and spelling. Sociolinguistic
competence includes rules of appropriateness of both meaning and grammatical forms in different sociolinguistic contexts. Discourse competence is the
knowledge required to combine forms and meanings to achieve spoken and written texts. Strategic competence is the knowledge of verbal and non-verbal
communication strategies which maybe called upon to compensate for limitations in one or more aspects of CC. Canale and Swain argued that knowledge is what
someone knows consciously, about a language and about aspects of communicative language use, and skill is how well she can perform this
knowledge in actual communication. Bachman and Palmer 1990 as cited in Celce-Murcia, 1995:8, who
divided language knowledge into two main categories, elaborated CC above as follows.
Language Knowledge consists of: 1.
Organization knowledge; the knowledge of the components involved in controlling the formal structure of language for
producing and recognizing grammatically correct sentences and for ordering these to form texts;
• grammatical knowledge is similar to Canale and Swain’s
grammatical competence, and textual knowledge •
textual knowledge: similar to Canale and Swain’s but more elaborate than their discourse competence
2. Pragmatic knowledge: the knowledge of the components that enable us
to relate words and utterances to the meanings, to the intentions of language users and to relevant characteristics of the language use in
contexts:
• lexical knowledge: the knowledge of the meanings of words and
the ability to use figurative language. •
functional knowledge or the relationship between the utterances and intentions, or communicative purposes of the language users.
• sociolinguistic knowledge: similar to Canale and Swain’s
sociolinguistic competence. Bachman and Palmer,1990 as cited in Celce-Murcia,1995:5
Through their elaboration of CC above, Bachman and Palmer exposed that in use, the language knowledge interacts with the metacognitive strategies, i.e.
assessment, goal-setting, and planning; the grammatical competence involves with textual and grammatical knowledge; whereas the discourse competence which
involves with the pragmatic knowledge includes the lexical, functional, and sociocultural knowledge.
The other model of CC was introduced by Celce-Murcia, et al. in 1995. The model was represented by a pyramid enclosing a circle and surrounded by
another circle. The circle within the pyramid is the discourse competence; the three points of the triangle are sociocultural competence, linguistic competence
and actional competence; and the strategic competence is represented by the circle surrounding the pyramid as shown in the figure on the next page.
Celce, et al. 1995 use the term linguistic competence in their model with the consideration that linguistic competence is not only related to grammar, but
lexis, phonology in addition to morphology and syntax, too. The term sociocultural competence is used here as to distinguish it from sociolinguistic
competence, for the former distinguishes better sociolinguistic competence from the actional competence.
They confirm that all resources of language are in linguistic, actional and discourse components whereas sociocultural knowledge is used to achieve the
appropriateness. They place lexical knowledge within linguistic competence since they follow Halliday 1985 who believes that the line between lexicon and
grammar can not be neatly drawn. This CC model is one of the psychological bases of 2006 EC.
Fig. 3 Schematic representation of Celce-Murcia CC model adopted from Celce, et al.:1995
On page 34, the chronological evolution of CC is given. Observing it, the CC becomes more and more developed in terms of its components. Bachman, et
al.’s functional competence is somehow different from the actional competence of Celce. The former is the one proposed by Halliday’s theoretical conception of
functional language in use. Whereas Celce, et al.’s actional competence is the competence in conveying and understanding communicative intent, that is,
matching actional intent with linguistic form based on the knowledge of an inventory of verbal schemata that carry illocutionary force, speech acts and speech
act sets Celce, et al.,1995:13. Thus the actional competence is related to the competence needed by a non-native when communication breakdown takes place
in his actual communication. The discourse competence concerns with the selection, sequencing, and
arrange- ment of words, structures, sentences and utterances to achieve a unified spoken or
written text , Celce, et al.,1995:13. This is the competence that combines the lexico-grammatical microlevel competence, the communicative intent macro level
competence , and the sociocultural competence to express attitude, and messages and to create texts.
In 1996 O’Grady et al. 1996: 508 offered a model CC as shown in the diagram
below. He completes Celce, et al.’s CC model with the psychological competence aspect.
Communicative Competence
Language competence Strategic competence Psychological competence
Organizational competence Pragmatic competence Grammatical Textual Illocutionary Sociolingistic
competence competence competence competence
Vocabulary Cohesion Rhetorical Dialect Cultural Organization
references Syntax Register
Morphology PhonologyGraphology Functional
Abilities
Fig. 4 William O’Grady et al.’s CC Model 1996: 508 From the explanation above it can be summed up that the CC model
changes in accordance with how a linguist views a language which changes from time to time. As the CC to achieve by a language learner changes, the language
education paradigm also changes. The next sub-chapter presents the shift of the paradigm in the language education.
2.4 Paradigm Shift in Language Education
