Understanding Communicative Competence and Language Skills
To relate communicative competence with communicative skills, we first have to define and clarify what communicative competence is and what its major characteristics are. It occurs when functional or social linguistics are related to traditions such as pragmatics, text linguistics, and discourse analysis. This offers us a theory of social processes involved in language use. Functional linguistics has developed the notion of communicative competence. This involves, apart from linguistic competence (the knowledge of the linguistic code), knowledge of language use. It means what a speaker has to know in order to communicate effectively in a speech community. According to Hymes, adding a communicative element to competence means adding rules of use and grammar, rules of syntax, rules of semantics, and rules of speech. Speakers need all this in order to understand and use linguistic forms. Canale and Swain referred to linguistic competence as grammatical competence. Chomsky proposed that the objective of the study of formalist linguistics is linguistic competence. It implies idealization, an abstraction of actual linguistic behavior. For him, it is the ideal speaker’s knowledge of language structure, the relations between elements in the various linguistic levels of the linguistic system or code.
Essential Competences Within Communicative Competence
Within communicative competence, we have three essential competences:
- Textual competence: The speaker/hearer’s knowledge of how to interpret individual elements in connection with other elements, how to combine them efficiently to integrate them into a spoken or written text.
- Interactional competence: The speaker/hearer’s knowledge of how to carry out effective communication with the interlocutor.
- Sociolinguistic competence: This refers to the speaker/hearer’s knowledge of the social context in which communication takes place.
We have to join these types of communicative competence in order to define and clarify… skill.
Communicative Language Teaching
Communicative language teaching is also important and is taught by practicing structures in situational activities, the same as what happens in skill-based activities. This communicative approach starts from a theory of language as communication. Its characteristics are:
- Language is a system for the expression of meaning.
- The primary function of language is to allow interaction and communication.
Learners have a negotiation role, and they are expected to interact in groups with the teacher. The teacher’s role is to facilitate the communicative process between all participants in the classroom. The materials that are used are textbooks, tables of contents and language practice materials, games, role-plays, and simulations.
Listening Skills and the Three Competences
If we want to speak about listening skills, we have to relate this to the three types of competence.
Interactional Competence in Listening
Within interactional competence, we find that most of the spoken language we listen to is informal and spontaneous. Students should learn to function successfully in real-life listening situations. This has various features:
- Brevity of chunks: People take turns speaking.
- Pronunciation: The pronunciation of words varies depending on the speaker.
- Vocabulary: Vocabulary is often colloquial.
- Grammar: Informal speech tends to be ungrammatical.
- Noise: There will be a certain amount of noise during the conversation.
- Redundancy: Speakers often say more than is necessary.
- Discourse structure: Discourse will not be repeated verbatim.
We can also relate these features to sociolinguistic competence.
The speaker usually directs the speech at the listener, taking into account their character, intentions, and objectives.
Sociolinguistic Competence in Listening
Within sociolinguistic competence, we see how the listener almost always knows in advance something about what is going to be said, who is speaking, or the basic topic. Only a very small proportion of listening is done “blind,” for example, on the radio or telephone.
Textual Competence in Listening
Textual competence, in this case, involves the type of text activities. Listening texts should be based on discourse that is improvised and spontaneous speech. The speaker is visible and interacts directly with the listener, so the classical listening activity (radio) is unnecessary. Learners should be encouraged to develop the ability to extract the information they need from a single hearing. Listening practice must be based on a text that the teacher improvises for the class and which is heard only once. The teacher provides the students with ideas about what they are going to hear. We can find different types of activities based on telling stories, jokes, songs, plot films or videos, and “do it yourself” activities.
All that we say about textual competence is done to improve the cohesion and coherence of the listening skill.