Communicative competences to acquire in the language teaching

As it was stated above, the main practical aim of teaching foreign languages is acquisition of communicative competence. It is essential to trace back the course of the research of the phenomenon and to analyse three representative models of communicative competence done by Dell Hymes, M. Canale and M. Swain, and L.F. Bachman.

D. Hymes (in 1972) was the first who proposed that communicative competence should include the social meaning. It is the person that becomes the highlight of communicative competence. The individual’s linguistic system, the psycholinguistic capacity of the individual, the nature of communication, possibility, feasibility, and appropriateness comprised Hymes’ understanding of communicative competence. In other words, communicative competence entails knowing not only the language code or the form of language, but also what to say to whom and how to say it appropriately in any given situation. Communicative competence includes knowledge of what to say, when, how, where, and to whom.

Later M. Canale and M. Swain’s version of communicative competence (1980) was related more with the communicative approach application in language teaching. They included grammatical, sociolinguistic, strategic and discourse competences in their definition. M. Canale and M. Swain highlighted the importance of context, but

somehow ignored the form (grammatical accuracy) in order to achieve the communicative function.

L.F. Bachman’s model (1990) is a more current attempt to take forward the subdivision of communicative competence provided by M. Canale and M. Swain. He proposed the framework of Communicative Language Ability (CLA) that includes language competence, strategic competence and psychophysiological mechanisms.

The above mentioned versions of communicative competence indicate three stages of development of the idea how to facilitate mutual recognition of language proficiency in the situation when the language learnt has immediate practical application outside the classroom.

According to the modern point of view, all human competences contribute in one way or another to the language user’s ability to communicate and may be regarded as aspects of communicative competence. Common European Framework of Reference for Languages presents a list of general human competences and communicative language competences. General human competences include declarative knowledge, skills and know-how, ‘existential’ competence and ability to learn.

How communicative language competence is understood nowadays is shown in (table 5 App.4). The table shows major reference documents that language practitioners follow while teaching in Ukraine - Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, National Educational Standard of Foreign Languages (CEF),

English Language Programme for 12-year Secondary Schools of2001,

Foreign Language Programme for 12-year Secondary School of2005.

All the documents mentioned concentrate their attention on the same sides of communicative competence. Yet, they view every competence from somewhat different prospective. To start with, the Common European Framework (together with Foreign Language Programs for 12-year secondary school of 2001 and 2005) talks about linguistic competence as lexical, phonological, syntactical knowledge and speech skills development. This component is considered in the document from the

point of view of a given individual’s communicative language competence, related not only to the range and quality of knowledge but also to cognitive organization and the way this knowledge is stored and to its accessibility. Knowledge may be conscious and readily expressible or may not. Its organization and accessibility will vary from one individual to another and vary also within the same individual. It can also be held that the cognitive organization of vocabulary and the storing of expressions depend, amongst other things, on the cultural features of the community or communities in which the individual has been socialized and where his or her learning has occurred.

In contrast to CEF, the National Educational Standard of FLT specifies language and speech competence, where speech competence is aimed at the acquisition and improvement of competence in all four skills: reading, speaking, listening, and writing, and language competence is the ability to use obtained knowledge of language (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, spelling) in oral and written communication. It presupposes the acquisition of systematic knowledge about language as means of sharing ideas and feelings and language habit formation.

Pragmatic competences mentioned in CEF are concerned with the functional use of linguistic resources (production of language functions, speech acts), drawing on scenarios or scripts of interactional exchanges. It also concerns the mastery of discourse, cohesion and coherence, the identification of text types and forms, irony, and parody. For this component even more than the linguistic component, it is hardly necessary to stress the major impact of interactions and cultural environments in which such abilities are constructed. Some other definitions of communicative competence (the Foreign Language Program of 2005) include the notions of discourse and strategic competences, which are actually parts of pragmatic competence. Discourse competence is the ability to organize speech structurally by means of thematic and logical organization, style, register and rhetoric effectiveness. Strategic competence means the ability to choose effective strategies for solving communicative tasks and the ability to gain knowledge independently, plan educational process and the ability for self-evaluation and self-assessment.

Sociolinguistic competence or sociocultural competence is the third major component of communicative competence. Sociolinguistic competences refer to the sociocultural conditions of language use as it is said in CEF. Through its sensitivity to social conventions (rules of politeness, norms governing relations between generations, sexes, classes and social groups, linguistic codification of certain fundamental rituals in the functioning of a community), the sociolinguistic component strictly affects all language communication between representatives of different cultures, even though participants may often be unaware of its influence.

Generally, communicative competence is viewed as functional language proficiency which involves interaction between different people or between a person and a written or oral text and comprises linguistic (language/speech), pragmatic (discourse/strategic) and sociolinguistic/ sociocultural competences.

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