Communicative Competence

           In the past decade much research related to communicative competence and communicative language use has emerged in various fields, research which now allows us to develop a model with more detailed content specifications than was possible in the early 1980s. The need for an updated and explicit description of language teaching areas generated with reference to a detailed model of communicative competence. Celce-Murcia and Zoltan Dornyei describe two existing models of communicative competence (the model proposed by Canale & Swain model and the Bachman & Palmer model) and then propose their own pedagogically motivated construct which includes five components: discourse competence, linguistic competence, actional competence, sociocultural competence, and strategic competence.

           Discourse competence is explained the selection, sequencing, and arrangement of words, structures, sentences and utterances to achieve a unified spoken or written text. Linguistic competence comprises the basic elements of communication: the sentence patterns and types, the constituent structure, the morphological inflections, and the lexical resources, as well as the phonological and orthographic systems needed to realize communication as speech or writing. Actional competence is defined as 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. Sociocultural competence refers to the speaker's knowledge of how to express messages appropriately within the overall social and cultural context of communication, in accordance with the pragmatic factors related to variation in language use. Strategic competence examined as knowledge of communication strategies and how to use them.

         It is motivated by practical considerations reflecting the interests in language teaching, language analysis, and teacher training. The goal therefore has been to organize the knowledge available about language use in a way that is consumable for classroom practice. The purposes of any model of this sort is to serve as an elaborated "checklist" that practitioners can refer to and to draw together a wide range of issues in an attempt to synthesize them and form a basis for further research. However this model also has inconsistencies and limitations that raise several questions.  Many questions concern where lexis is to be placed in a model of communicative competence and how important the role of formulaic language is and even though the summary of communication strategies in this model is broader than some previous taxonomies, the restricting of strategic competence to communication strategies only is likely to be considered too narrow an interpretation of strategic competence. On the other way, the current conceptualization of sociocultural competence might still be too broad and the past tendency to redefine some of the sub-components of sociolinguistic or sociocultural competence as independent competencies in their own right may well continue.

          Moreover, the sub-components of the five competencies will need to be further elaborated and the extent of their teach ability assessed in order to make them optimally relevant to language pedagogy. The components contain a mixture of categories in their present form such as knowledge, rules, skills, abilities, conditions, conventions, maxims, strategies, lexical items, etc. These will have to be more systematically specified, based on a psycholinguistic model of language processing. The application of any theoretical model of communicative competence is relative rather than absolute. Nonetheless, the problems encountered and the modifications that had to make, the communicative competence framework provided an integrated and principled basis for designing a language program.