Theory Of Communicative Competence

In the early 1970s, in an attempt to overcome more traditional and grammatical approaches, classes adopted a more communicative behaviour, with interaction being the central point of language teaching and learning. The theory of Communicative Competence introduced by the sociolinguist Dell Hymes (1966) was developed as an answer to Chomsky’s idea of linguistic competence. Chomsky (1965) made a distinction between “competence - knowledge of the language” and “performance - the actual use of language in concrete situations”, considering the first an innate process (Universal Grammar). Hymes, on the other hand, spoke of the learner’s competence to combine grammatical and sociocultural knowledge as well. This theory was further enhanced by Canale and Swain (1980) who stressed the division of communicative competence into strategic, grammatical, and sociolinguistic. This division did not underestimate the importance of grammar, it just put grammatical competence into a more widely defined communicative competence model (Savignon, 2002: 7). Later on, discourse competence was added to comprise with the other three components of a learner’s communicative competence (Savignon, 2002: 7-9), in order for the learner to be able to expand most effectively h/her communicative competence of a second language.

He talked about ‘the acquisition/learning distinction’, the ‘monitor hypothesis’ which refers to the way the already acquired input is monitored by learning and the ‘natural order hypothesis’ which claims that there is an order in the way grammar rules are learned. Furthermore, the idea that language is better acquired if it is offered one level beyond the existing linguistic level of the learner belongs to the ‘input hypothesis’ (i+1), while the ‘affective filter hypothesis’ posits that second language acquisition is affected by different factors, as for example the psychological state of the

Within the framework of cognitive science, authors such as Wong-Fillmore (1991), Anderson (1983), (O´Malley & Chamot, 1983) or (Faerch & Kasper, 1985) claimed that in order to use a language successfully it was not sufficient with having a declarative knowledge of the language ("knowing that"), it was also vital to acquire a procedural knowledge of the language ("knowing how"). Therefore, for the learner to communicate, h/she must have acquired a procedural knowledge by means of going through different cognitive stages (cognitive, associative and autonomous). This is why, we teachers should offer students plenty of meaningful communicative activities in the classroom to help them achieve this procedural knowledge rather than focusing on more formal aspects of the language.

Since comprehension and production should go hand in hand from the very beginning of the learning process, it is crucial to provide our students with high exposure to the language by means of real communicative situations. In this sense, the social context of interaction coined by Bruner as format (1985) represents an excellent technique to focus on performance rather than competence.

Bruner argued that “learning to know the language” may be accomplished without considerable external help while “learning to use the language” cannot be conquered solely without the assistance of other factors, such as the tutor, because the use of