3 Rethinking the Role of Communicative Competence in Language Teaching

3 Rethinking the Role of Communicative Competence in Language Teaching Marianne Celce-Murcia University of California, USA 3.1 Introduction In the mid-1990s I had many discussions with colleagues concerning the role of ‘communicative competence’ in language teaching and applied linguistics. These discussions resulted in two publications (Celce-Murcia et al. 1995; Celce-Murcia 1995). Then during the late 1990s I co-authored a text on the role of discourse and context in language teaching (Celce- Murcia and Olshtain 2000), which further influenced my thinking about the role of communicative competence in language teaching. In this paper I present a revised and updated model of communicative competence which synthesizes and elaborates on my previous work and which further explores the role that this model of communicative competence could play in language teaching. The term ‘communicative competence’ has been in circulation for about forty years and has been used extensively in justifications and explications of communicative language teaching. Thus before I discuss my revised model in some detail, I would like to summarize briefly the evolution of the term ‘communicative competence’ starting with its original source (Hymes 1967, 1972) through the contributions of Canale and Swain (1980), Canale (1983), and Celce-Murcia et al. (1995). There have been other models proposed to represent constructs similar to ‘communicative competence’ (e.g., the ‘language ability’ in Bachman (1990); Bachman and Palmer (1996); however, these models have been developed with language assessment in mind—rather than language teaching. For most discussions of language pedagogy per se, the model proposed by Canale and Swain (l980), along with the elaborations proposed by Canale (l983), remain the key sources for discussions of communicative competence and related applications in applied linguistics and language pedagogy. 41 E. Alcón Soler and M.P. Safont Jordà (eds.), Intercultural Language Use and Language Learning, 41–57. © 2007 Springer. 42 Celce-Murcia As mentioned above, ‘communicative competence’ is a term coined by the anthropological linguist Dell Hymes (1967, 1972); he put forward this notion in response to the theories of the formal linguist Noam Chomsky (Chomsky 1957; 1965), who focused on linguistic competence and claimed that any consideration of social factors was outside the domain of linguistics. Hymes (1972) argued that in addition to linguistic competence (the rules for describing sound systems and for combining sounds into morphemes and morphemes into sentences), one also needed notions of sociolinguistic competence (the rules for using language appropriately in context) to account for language acquisition and language use. Hymes thus argued that language structure and its acquisition were not context-free, while Chomsky had claimed they were (i.e. that an innate language mechanism was sufficient to account for first language acquisition). At about that time applied linguists and language teachers were developing the communicative approach to language teaching in reaction to grammar translation and audiolingual approaches to language pedagogy. Many applied linguists adopted Hymes’ terminology and perspective, and his notion of communicative competence thus became part of the theoretical justification for a new language teaching approach and new teaching materials that were compatible with communication as the goal of second or foreign language teaching. Among the earliest applied linguists to develop and elaborate a model of communicative competence that course designers and language teachers could apply to teaching and assessment were Canale and Swain (1980), who added strategic competence (i.e. the ability to compensate for problems or deficits in communication and do various types of planning) to the linguistic competence and sociolinguistic competence that Hymes (1972) had proposed; however, they referred to ‘linguistic competence’ as ‘grammatical competence’. A few years later, Canale (1983) added discourse competence (the ability to produce and interpret language beyond the sentence level) to the model. In the mid nineties Celce-Murcia et al. (1995) proposed that actional competence (the ability to comprehend and produce all significant speech acts and speech act sets) should also be part of communicative competence. These authors made two changes in terminology re: the Canale-Swain model: (1) that sociolinguistic competence be modified to sociocultural competence (the cultural background knowledge needed to interpret and use a language effectively) and (2) that grammatical competence be re-labeled as linguistic competence to explicitly include the sound system and the lexicon as well as the grammar (i.e., morphology and syntax). This historical development of the components included in the various models of communicative competence is summarized in Figure 3.1: Chomsky Hymes Canale and Swain Canale Celce-Murcia et al. (1957, 1965) (1967, 1972) (1980) (1983) (1995) Linguistic Linguistic Grammatical Grammatical Linguistic Competence Competence Competence Competence Competence Sociolinguistic Strategic Strategic Strategic Competence Competence Competence Competence Sociolinguistic Sociolinguistic Sociolinguistic Competence Competence Competence Actional Competence Discourse Discourse Competence Competence Figure 3.1 Chronological evolution of ‘communicative competence’ 44 Celce-Murcia One of the important contributions of Celce-Murcia et al. (1995) was to specify that the various components of communicative competence were interrelated and that it was important to properly describe the nature of these interrelationships in order to fully understand the construct of communicative competence. To this end they offered Figure 3.2 in their 1995 publication, which made the interrelationships explicit: This 1995 model is a pyramid enclosing a circle, surrounded by another circle. The circle inside the pyramid is discourse competence, the core or central competence. The three points of the triangle are the top-down sociocultural competence and the bottom-up linguistic competence and actional competence. The arrows indicate that the various components are constantly interacting with each other and the discourse component. This construct thus placed the discourse component in a central position where the lexico-grammatical resources, the actional organizing skills, and the sociocultural context all come together and shape the discourse. The circle surrounding the pyramid is strategic competence, an available inventory of communicative, cognitive, and metacognitive strategies that allow a skilled interlocutor to negotiate meanings, resolve ambiguities, and to compensate for deficiencies in any of the other competencies. SOCIO- CULTURAL COMPETENCE DISCOURSE COMPETENCE LINGUISTIC ACTIONAL COMPETENCE COMPETENCE STRATEGIC COMPETENCE Figure 3.2 Schematic representation of communicative competence in Celce-Murcia et al. (1995: 10) Rethinking the Role of Communicative Competence 45 While this model and the content specifications provided by Celce- Murcia et al. (1995) were a step forward with respect to Canale and Swain (1980) and Canale (1983), there were still some perceived gaps that Celce- Murcia tried to fill later during the same year (Celce-Murcia 1995) in an attempt to give a more central role to formulaic language (as opposed to language as system) and to the paralinguistic aspects of face-to-face oral communication. 3.2 A Proposed Revision of the 1995 Models With ten years’ hindsight and with the benefit of co-authoring a teachers’ handbook on the role of discourse and context in language teaching in the interim (Celce-Murcia and Olshtain 2000), I now propose the following model (Figure 3.3) to describe communicative competence for language teachers (this model draws heavily on both Celce-Murcia et al. (1995) and Celce-Murcia (1995): SOCIO- CULTURAL COMPETENCE LINGUISTIC DISCOURSE FORMULAIC COMPETENCE COMPETENCE COMPETENCE STRATEGIC COMPETENCE INTERACTIONAL COMPETENCE Figure 3.3 Revised schematic representation of ‘communicative competence’ 46 Celce-Murcia 3.2.1 Sociocultural Competence This most recent model maintains the top-down role of sociocultural competence. Sociocultural competence refers to the speaker’s pragmatic knowledge, i.e. how to express messages appropriately within the overall social and cultural context of communication. This includes knowledge of language variation with reference to sociocultural norms of the target language. In fact a social or cultural blunder can be far more serious than a linguistic error when one is engaged in oral communication. The pedagogical challenge lies in the fact that second and foreign language teachers typically have far greater awareness and knowledge of linguistic rules than they do of the sociocultural behaviors and expectations that accompany use of the target language. Even when good cultural descriptions are available, it is hard to get learners to change their native verbal behavior based on a new set of assumptions. Celce-Murcia et al. (1995: 23–24) describe several sociocultural variables, three of which are most crucial in terms of the current model. - social contextual factors: the participants’ age, gender, status, social distance and their relations to each other re: power and affect. - stylistic appropriateness: politeness strategies, a sense of genres and registers. - cultural factors: background knowledge of the target language group, major dialects/regional differences,

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