Communicative Competence Essay

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Communicative Competence Putting language in the perspective of communication means viewing language as a means of getting along with others, that is, to make one a part of a society. This is one valid way of looking at language. Within this tradition, the combination of knowledge and skills that enables someone to communicate in language is called communicative competence (CC). The term CC was coined by Hymes (1979) and since then several models of CC have arrived in the international literature including models proposed by Canale and Swain (1980), Canale (1983), Celce-Murcia et al (1995) and other scholars who have proposed theoretical concepts of CC according to their research purposes (Munby (1978), Weinmann and Backlund (1980), Corder (1973), Savignon (1983), Bachman and Palmer (1996). Although CC has not received an agreed interpretation, various CC models do share substantial compatibility, that is, communicative competence is discourse competence (DC). One model of CC that explicitly addresses language pedagogy is the one proposed by Celce-Murcia et al. (1995). Diagram 1: Schematic representation of Communicative Competence (Celce-Murcia et al. 1995:10) The proposed model has been motivated by their “belief in the potential of a direct, explicit approach to the teaching of communicative skills, which would require detailed description of what communicative competence entails in order to use the sub-components as a content base in syllabus design” (1995:6). It is also developed from an L2 perspective but a great deal of it is assumed to have validity for describing L1 use as well. Their model proposes five types of competence: linguistic competence, actional competence, sociocultural competence, strategic competence, and at the heart of the model is discourse competence. In
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