Communicative Competence
stand on its own.
Noam Chomsky
- Avram Noam Chomsky
- December 7,1928
- An American linguist, philosopher,
cognitive scientist, historian, logician,
social critic, and political activist.
Sometimes, he is regarded as the
“Father of Modern Linguistics”
- Describes competence as an idealized
capacity that is located as a
psychological or mental property or
function and performance as the
production of actual utterances.
(Chomsky, 1965)
In short, competence involves “knowing” the
language and performance involves “doing”
something with the language. The difficulty with
this construct is that it is very difficult to assess
competence without assessing performance.
Aspects of Linguistic Competence
By Canale & Swain (1980)
1) Grammatical Competence
- Knowing how to use words and the rules
that govern them.
- What words do I use? How do I put
them into phrases and sentences?
- Can be further measured by one’s
mastery in the 6 major subfields of
Linguistics:
 Phonetics – studies the nature of
speech sounds and the production and
perception of these sounds.
 Phonology – studies the way in which
speech sounds form systems and
patterns. It studies the production of
sounds and how they are stored in the
mind as well as how these combinations
are able to create meaning.
 Morphology – a level of language
analysis which deals with the internal
arrangement of words and their
inflections. It seeks to analyze, describe
and classify meaningful grammatical
units and how these units (morphemes)
are organized in the process of word
formation.
Free Morpheme – a type of morpheme that can
Bound Morpheme – a morpheme that appears
only as part of a larger word.
 Free morphemes can be Lexical or
functional morphemes.
 Lexical Morpheme – free morphemes
that have meaning by themselves.
Example: Cat, Bed, Girl, Friend, Table
 Functional Morpheme – a morpheme
which modifies the meaning of the word,
rather than supplying the root meaning
of the word. Example: To, The, Which,
She, On
 Bound Morpheme can be Inflectional or
Derivational Morpheme.
 Inflectional – combination does not
change the part of speech thus making it
similar to the word it was derived from.
Example: Bigger, Walking, Friends
 Derivational Morpheme – the part of
speech and the meaning changes.
Example: Happiness, Baker, Desirable
 Syntax – is a set of rules in a language.
It dictates how words from different parts
of speech are put together in order to
convey a complete thought.
Remember: there are only grammatical
and ungrammatical sentences.
 Semantics – it is the field of linguistics
concerned with the study of meaning in
language. It deals with how languages
organize and express meanings.
 Pragmatics -
2) Socio-Linguistic Competence
- Knowing how to use and respond to
language appropriately, given the
setting, the topic, and the relationships
among the people communicating.
- Which words and phrases fit this setting
and this topic? How can I express a
specific attitude (courtesy, authority,
friendliness, respect) when I need to?
How do I know what attitude another
person is expressing?
3) Discourse Competence
- Knowing how to interpret the larger
context and how to construct longer
 stretches of language so that the parts
make up a coherent whole.
- Discourse competence asks: how are
words, phrases and sentences are put
together to create conversations,
speeches, email messages, newspaper
articles?

4) Strategic Competence
- Knowing how to recognize and repair
communication breakdowns, how to
work around gaps in one’s knowledge of
the language, and how to learn more
about the language and in the context.
- Strategic Competence asks: How do I
know when I’ve misunderstood or when
someone has misunderstood me? What
do I say then? How can I express my
ideas if I don’t know the name of
something or the right verb form to use?