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THE UNIVERSITY OF NAIROBI - COLLEGE OF EDUCATION AND EXTERNAL

STUDIES
SCHOOL OF CONTINUING AND DISTANCE EDUCATION
DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIES
ASSIGNMENT
NAME: OGENDO. ATIENO. NAOMI
REGISTRATION NUMBER: L35/105613/2017
SUBJECT: LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE TEACHING
CODE: BLL 309

TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE

1.INTRODUCTION 2-3
2. DISTINCTION OF THE THREE TERMS: COMPETENCE, PERFORMANCE
COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE 3-7
3.REASONS AS TO WHY A LANGUAGE TEACHER NEEDS TO BE AWARE OF THE
DISTINCTION AMONG THE THREE TERMS 7-8
4. CONCLUSION 8
5. REFERENCES 8-10

QUESTION: Noam Chomsky distinguishes between competence and performance while

Dell Hymes explains further on communicative competence. Distinguish among the three
terms and explain why a language teacher needs to be aware of the distinction.
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INTRODUCTION
The notion of communicative competence, first proposed by linguistic anthropologist Dell
Hymes, emerged in reaction to the concept of linguistic competence put forward by cognitive
linguist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky distinguished between linguistic performance, or actual
language use in context, and linguistic competence, or innate language knowledge. He claimed
that only the latter was worthy of scientific attention. Hymes refuted this distinction and the
disregard for performance, proposing instead a theory of communicative competence that sought
to explain the rules underlying people’s contextually appropriate language use. Noam Chomsky’s
(1965) work on linguistic competence developed from his critique of radical behaviorism,
represented by the work of psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner. Behaviorism conceptualizes
individuals’ behavior, including their language learning and use, to be conditioned by observable
processes of stimulus, response, learning history (repetition), and reinforcement –of habit
formation. For behaviorists, allusions to psychological or cognitive activities had no place in
scientific theory. Chomsky argued that behaviorist accounts of language learning and use were
insufficient –for example for explaining the fact that young children rapidly employ language to
which they have never been exposed. Thus, humans’ language behavior and behavioral
capacities must exceed the limits of the process posited by behaviorists. Chomsky argued that
language learning and use could not be explained by the passive formation of habits, but rather
people actively formulate linguistic norms from infancy thanks to an innate universal grammar
that allows for infinite linguistic possibilities, activated by exposure to language. Linguistic
competence refers to this intrinsic grammatical system that allows people to produce endless
grammatical sentences and to distinguish between what is grammatically correct or not.
According to Chomsky, the benchmark of linguistic competence is that of the ideal native
speaker of a given language –that is, of the expert monolingual speaker. Chomsky’s notion of
competence contrasted with that of performance, or socially situated language use, with all that
the real-time production of utterances implies: false starts, interruptions, grammatical
inaccuracies, slips of tongue, word searches, etc. As an imperfect representation of language,
performance, according to Chomsky, lacked scientific interest. Parallels can be drawn between
Chomsky’s notion of competence and the Saussure reference to langue, and Chomsky’s
performance and Saussure’s parole. While Chomsky’s concern for innate language knowledge –
linguistic competence– continues to be shared by many researchers and language professionals,
the 1960s and 1970s witnessed the development of approaches to language and language
competences which foreground social context. On the one hand, the British linguistic tradition
had long been interested in social context in its descriptions of human linguistic behavior.
Following the work carried out by John Rupert Firth since the 1930s, Michael Halliday (1961)
founded systemicfunctional linguistics. This approach to linguistics takes into account structural
aspects of language, while focusing first and foremost on its pragmatic function –that is, on the
functions carried out through language and on the linguistic mechanisms for the achievement of
such actions. In this sense, considering the social context and the situated appropriateness of
language use is relevant, since it determines the meaning potential of a particular utterance, and
hence a language user’s capacity to produce social action by employing particular linguistic
resources. Concurrently, on the European continent there was a need to respond to the language
learning needs of a growing migrant population, which led the Council of Europe to develop
curricula based on communicative functions, inspired by systemic functional linguistics, thus
promoting a performance-driven understanding of competence. Certainly, the most important
development, however, took place in the United States during the same period of time. There,
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anthropologist Dell Hymes (1966) formulated a transcendental critique of the notion of

competence as formulated by Chomsky. Hymes challenged the disregard of performance, and
proposed that what should really claim scientific interest is what he referred to as communicative
competence. This competence is intrinsically related to the sociocultural context and the
communicative rules of communities, and includes the set of skills that a person must possess in
order to communicate in socially appropriate ways. Hymes’ (1972) proposed the SPEAKING
model as a heuristic for identifying aspects of a communicative event influencing what it means
to communicate competently in context. The model starts with the setting and scene (S),
understood as both the physical time and place of a communicative event, as well as
consideration of what basic interactional encounter is taking place. Secondly, the model refers to
the participants (P), including the speaker and interlocutors. The model follows by taking into
account the ends (E), including participants’ goal-directed orientations, and any pre-determined
social or institutional objectives of an event. It further recognizes the overall sequential, topical
and turn-taking organization of the event (referred to as act sequence, hence the A) as a feature of
context. Key (K) is also included, taking account of the tone, manner or spirit of an event,
including the different stances that participants can take up and have to interpret when
communicating with others. So too are the available instrumentalities (I) or communicative
modes (speaking, writing, etc.) and resources (languages, registers, etc.) available to participants,
considered in the model. The context of a communicative event also includes certain norms (N)
for producing and interpreting speech acts. Finally, the model takes account of the discursive
activity or genre (G). Hymes’ notion of communicative competence became extremely
influential in research on second and foreign language acquisition from the 1970s, where it was
developed further. This was due in large part to the work of Michael Canale and Merrill Swain
(1980), who operationalized communicative competence by defining four interrelated sub-
competencies that constituted it: grammatical, discursive, sociolinguistic and strategic.
Grammatical competence, similar to Chomsky’s linguistic competence, refers to the knowledge
allowing users to construct and interpret grammatically correct utterances. Discursive
competence refers to the ability to produce and understand cohesive and coherent utterances.
Sociolinguistic competence refers to the capacity to adapt language use to the social context.
Strategic competence describes the way users compensate for communicative problems.

DISTINCTION OF THE THREE TERMS: COMPETENCE, PERFORMANCE

COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE

Hymes’ Theory of Communicative Competence

Hymes’ view of communicative competence (cf. 1967; 1972) brought an anthropological

understanding to language, as it provides a model for analyzing a communicative event in its
socio-cultural context. His model indicates the various parameters that govern communication in
terms of what to say, when, to whom, and how to say it, and with what intention. This set of
parameters in its pragmatic, goal-oriented, and functional aspects has served as a guide for
language teaching since the 1980s. It formed the basis of the functional approach to language
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teaching (cf Wilkinson, 1976), which was developed further in the Threshold Levels (Van Ek,
1991) of the Council of Europe, the precursor to the Common European Framework, which I
discussed earlier in the chapter.

This approach focused on language functions in a few specific domains of language use such as
shopping, travel, house and home, food, and drink. Language teaching for communicative
competence reduced Hymes’ notion of communication to a limited and fixed set of situational
topics, through which the learner would encounter and practice communicative acts such as
giving a warning, inviting someone or asking for help, within set domains using set phrases. Its
focus became a goal-oriented view of language where limited features of the situational context
were the principal determinants of the linguistic choices to be made.

Reducing language teaching predominantly to the context of situation limits the learners’
understanding of the role that our social and cultural environment has to play in our language
use. Considering the context according to set parameters assumes that the rules for social
communication used in one situation are the same in all situations of that kind. Like the
Saussurean tradition, it assumes stability of meaning. It ignores the unpredictability of
communicative events and the individual choices we might make in our utterances to respond to
the context. It could be argued that learners would at least need to learn the conventions used in
certain communicative settings, but even in situations governed largely by conventions we have
the freedom to act in accordance with those conventions or not. As Kress (1994: 176) argues,
even a decision to conform is an act of choice, and as such involves a ‘new production of the
meaning of conformity’.

However, it is not only the limited interpretation of Hymes’ (1967; 1972) formulation of
communicative competence view of language which is the problem. I believe that his model,
whilst helping us to understand the very important role of the immediate context, or the context
of the situation, does not fully address the idea of the complexity of culture. Even though cultural
conventions are addressed through the parameters of ‘norm’ (social rules) and ‘genre’ (arguably
a social view of text), it does not question or consider the wider view of ‘context of culture’,
which consists of wider societal influences and ideological forces and discourses (Halliday,
1985). Hymes did consider ideology in his later work, which I will refer to in the next chapter,
but that work did not have an impact on language teaching.

The two notions of context come from the anthropologist Malinowski (1884-1942). Kramsch
glosses Malinowski’s idea of ‘context of situation’ as the ‘immediate physical, spatial, temporal,
and social environment in which verbal exchange takes place’ (1998: 126). Indeed, this is similar
to Hymes’ parameters governing communicative competence. But in order to understand
meaning more fully, one also had to take account of the context of culture, Malinowski argued,
which, as Kramsch quotes Malinowski, means taking account of ‘tribal economics, social
organization, kinship patterns, fertility rites, seasonal rhythms, concepts of time and space’ (ibid.
p. 26). Whilst this relates to a traditional anthropological and static view of culture, the idea of
context of culture can include a poststructuralist view of culture. The aim of achieving
communicative competence in language learning has now been replaced by the notion of
Intercultural Communicative Competence (Byram, 1997).
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Linguistic Competence and Linguistic Performance

"In [Noam] Chomsky's theory, our linguistic competence is our unconscious knowledge
of languages and is similar in some ways to [Ferdinand de] Saussure's concept of langue, the
organizing principles of a language. What we actually produce as utterances is similar to
Saussure's parole, and is called linguistic performance. The difference between linguistic
competence and linguistic performance can be illustrated by slips of the tongue, such as 'noble
tons of soil' for 'noble sons of toil.' Uttering such a slip doesn't mean that we don't know English
but rather that we've simply made a mistake because we were tired, distracted, or whatever. Such
'errors' also aren't evidence that you are (assuming you are a native speaker) a poor English
speaker or that you don't know English as well as someone else does. It means that linguistic
performance is different from linguistic competence. When we say that someone is a better
speaker than someone else (Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, was a terrific orator, much
better than you might be), these judgements tell us about performance, not competence. Native
speakers of a language, whether they are famous public speakers or not, don't know the language
any better than any other speaker in terms of linguistic competence." (Kristin Denham and Anne
Lobeck, Linguistics for Everyone. Wadsworth, 2010)

"Two language users may have the same 'program' for carrying out specific tasks of production
and recognition, but differ in their ability to apply it because of exogenous differences (such as
short-term memory capacity). The two are accordingly equally language-competent but not
necessarily equally adept at making use of their competence.

"The linguistic competence of a human being should accordingly be identified with that
individual's internalized 'program' for production and recognition. While many linguists would
identify the study of this program with the study of performance rather than competence, it
should be clear that this identification is mistaken since we have deliberately abstracted away
from any consideration of what happens when a language user actually attempts to put the
program to use. A major goal of the psychology of language is to construct a viable hypothesis as
to the structure of this program . . .." (Michael B. Kac, Grammars and Grammaticality. John
Benjamins, 1992).

A SUMMARY OF THE DISTINCTION AMONG THE THREE

TERMS

The concepts of competence, performance, and communicative competence as proposed by

Noam Chomsky and Dell Hymes.
1. Linguistic Competence (Chomsky)- Definition: Linguistic competence refers to
the idealized speaker-hearer’s knowledge of their language. It encompasses the system
of rules governing syntax, morphology, phonology, and semantics.

Nature: It is an internalized mental representation of language, allowing native speakers to

generate and understand an infinite number of grammatically correct sentences.
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Example: When you know that “The cat sat on the mat” is grammatically correct, you are
demonstrating linguistic competence.

Significance for Language Teachers: Language teachers need to understand linguistic

competence because it forms the foundation for language use. It helps them design effective
language instruction and assess learners’ progress

Performance (Chomsky)- Definition: Performance refers to the actual use of language in real-
life situations. It involves producing sentences, understanding spoken language, and applying
linguistic competence.
Nature: Performance can be affected by various factors such as memory limitations, distractions,
and communication context.
Example: When you speak spontaneously, make errors, or hesitate, you are demonstrating
performance.
Significance for Language Teachers: Teachers must recognize that learners’ performance may
not always reflect their full linguistic competence. Addressing performance-related challenges
(e.g., anxiety, memory constraints) is crucial for effective language teaching.
.
Communicative Competence (Hymes)- Definition: Dell Hymes introduced the concept of
communicative competence as a response to perceived limitations in Chomsky’s linguistic
competence-performance distinction.

Nature: Communicative competence extends beyond grammatical knowledge. It involves

understanding how and when to use language appropriately in social contexts.

Components- Linguistic Competence: Knowledge of grammar and vocabulary.

Sociocultural Competence: Awareness of cultural norms, social roles, and context-specific

language use.

Strategic Competence: Ability to use communication strategies (e.g., paraphrasing, repair

strategies) to overcome obstacles.

Discourse Competence: Understanding how to structure conversations and narratives.

Importance for Language Teachers:

Awareness: Language teachers need to be aware of these distinctions to design effective

language instruction. They must recognize that competence alone does not guarantee successful
communication.

Teaching Context: Teachers should address not only linguistic rules but also pragmatic aspects,
cultural norms, and situational appropriateness.

Empowering Learners: By emphasizing communicative competence, teachers empower

learners to navigate real-world language use beyond the classroom.
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Example: Knowing when to use formal language in a job interview versus informal language
with friends demonstrates communicative competence.

WHY LANGUAGE TEACHERS NEED TO BE AWARE:

1. Effective Teaching and Learning:

Competence: Understanding the difference between competence and performance helps teachers
design more effective language lessons. While competence focuses on idealized knowledge,
performance deals with actual language use. Teachers must strike a balance between teaching
grammar rules (competence) and enabling practical communication (performance).

Communicative Competence: By emphasizing communicative competence, teachers prepare

learners for real-world interactions. It goes beyond grammar correctness and includes pragmatic
aspects, such as context, intention, and social norms. Awareness of communicative competence
ensures that students can effectively navigate various situations.

2. Contextual Understanding:

Performance: Teachers need to recognize that learners’ performance may vary due to factors
like anxiety, context, and audience. Being aware of performance challenges allows teachers to
provide targeted support.

Communicative Competence: Understanding the context in which language is used is crucial.

Teachers should guide students on appropriate language choices based on the situation. For
instance, formal language at a job interview versus informal language with friends.

3. Holistic Approach:
Competence: Focusing solely on linguistic competence (grammar, vocabulary, syntax) may not
prepare learners for real communication. Teachers should integrate performance-based activities
to bridge the gap.

Communicative Competence: Integrating both competence and performance aspects leads to a

holistic approach. It ensures that students not only know the rules but also apply them effectively
in diverse contexts.

4. Assessment and Testing:

Competence: Teachers need to assess linguistic competence through tests, but they should also
recognize that performance may vary due to stress or other factors.

Communicative Competence: Performance tests should measure communicative competence.

Teachers can evaluate how well students apply language rules in real-world situations.

5. Practical Classroom Strategies:

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Performance: Teachers can create a supportive environment where students feel comfortable
experimenting with language. Encourage risk-taking and provide constructive feedback.

Communicative Competence: Design activities that simulate real communication scenarios.

Role-playing, debates, and problem-solving tasks enhance students’ communicative competence.

6. Cultural Awareness:

Performance: Teachers should be aware of cultural differences in communication styles. What

works in one culture may not be effective in another.

Communicative Competence: Cultural context significantly influences communication.

Teachers can help students navigate cultural nuances, such as politeness norms and gestures.

CONCLUSION

Language teachers who understand the interplay between competence, performance, and
communicative competence can create more effective learning experiences for their students. By
fostering a balance between theory and practice, teachers empower learners to use language
confidently and appropriately in various contexts. Linguistic competence focuses on abstract
language knowledge, communicative competence considers the practical application of language
in diverse social settings. Language teachers play a crucial role in nurturing both aspects to
create proficient and effective communicators. Linguistic competence provides the theoretical
foundation, communicative competence bridges the gap between theory and real-world language
use. Language teachers must be aware of these distinctions to create meaningful and effective
language learning experiences for their students. Linguistic competence (Chomsky’s focus)
provides the foundation, communicative competence (Hymes’ contribution) equips language
learners with the practical ability to use language effectively in diverse contexts. Language
teachers should strive to nurture both competences to create proficient communicators.

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