Use in Education
The notion of communicative competence is one of the theories that underlies the communicative approach to foreign language teaching.
Canale and Swain (1980) defined communicative competence in terms of three components:
- grammatical competence: words and rules
- sociolinguistic competence: appropriateness
- strategic competence: appropriate use of communication strategies
Canale (1983) refined the above model, adding discourse competence: cohesion and coherence
A more recent survey of communicative competence by Bachman (1990) divides it into the broad headings of "organizational competence," which includes both grammatical and discourse (or textual) competence, and "pragmatic competence," which includes both sociolinguistic and "illocutionary" competence. Strategic Competence is associated with the interlocutors' ability in using communication strategies (Faerch & Kasper, 1983; Lin, 2009).
Through the influence of communicative language teaching, it has become widely accepted that communicative competence should be the goal of language education, central to good classroom practice. This is in contrast to previous views in which grammatical competence was commonly given top priority. The understanding of communicative competence has been influenced by the field of pragmatics and the philosophy of language concerning speech acts as described in large part by John Searle and J.L. Austin.
Read more about this topic: Communicative Competence
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“It is not every man who can be a Christian, even in a very moderate sense, whatever education you give him. It is a matter of constitution and temperament, after all. He may have to be born again many times. I have known many a man who pretended to be a Christian, in whom it was ridiculous, for he had no genius for it. It is not every man who can be a free man, even.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)