Communicative Competence

Labov

1960

Labov described dual competence in reception and single competence in production. He was the first linguist to study languages varieties and dialects.

N. Chomsky

1965

By competence, Chomsky means the shared knowledge of the ideal speaker-listener set in a completely homogeneous speech community. "Human language is the product of deciphering a program determined by our genes"

Halliday

1970

Halliday enriches Hymes' social, situational and contextual proposal with regard to communicative competence. Their contribution lies in the establishment of a series of functions that involve the exchange of meanings and occurs when people simply interact. The seven functions proposed by Halliday are grouped into: instrumental, regulatory, interpersonal, personal, heuristic, imaginative and representative.

Hymes

1972

Hymes is important in history for being the first person to challenge Noam Chomsky's notion of competition. According to Hymes, communicative competence comes from the use of language in a particular situation and context. The eight components of linguistic interaction structured in the acronym SPEAKING.

Widdowson

1978

According with Widdowson views, language learning is not merely as acquiring the knowledge of the rules of grammar, but also as acquiring the ability to use language to communicate. He says that knowing a language is more than how to understand, speak, read, and write sentences, but how sentences are used to communicate.

Canale and Swain

1980

Theoretical framework of communicative competence Canale and Swain believe that the sociolinguistic work of Hymes is important to the development of a communicative approach to language learning. Their work focuses on the interaction of social context, grammar, and meaning (more precisely, social meaning). Canale and Swain maintain that there are rules of language use that would be useless without rules of grammar.

Bachman

1990

For Bachman, communicative competence is the general skill that allows an individual to make the most effective use of the skills available when performing a particular task, whether that task is related to the communicative use of the language or is with nonverbal tasks.

Bachman & Palmer

1996

For these authors, linguistic ability is composed of four elements that interact with each other in a given situation; thematic knowledge, the affective scheme, communicative competence and strategic competence. Language functions are: heuristic, idealistic, imaginative and manipulative.

Maturana

2011

To Maturana communicative competence is “Constructo globalizante que abarca las habilidades, destrezas y conocimientos de los que ha de servirse el usuario de la lengua para interactuar efectivamente en diversos contextos sociales” (Maturana, 2011, p. 76)