Chapter 4 Communicative Language Ability Part 1 Introduction

Chapter 4 Communicative Language Ability Part 1

Introduction § § Different factors affect performance on language tests. Understanding these factors and how they affect test scores is fundamental to the development and use of language tests. Lg testing specialists have recognized the need to base the development and use of lg test on a theory of lg proficiency.

• Specialists have called for the incorporation of a theoretical framework of what lg proficiency is with methods and technology involved in measuring it. • In this chapter a framework for describing communicative lg ability as both knowledge of lg and the capacity for implementing that knowledge in communicative lg use will be proposed. This framework is presented as one part of a theory of factors that affect performance on lg tests.

• In this chapter communicative lg ability will be described. The description is consistent with earlier works in communicative competence, in that it recognizes that the ability to use lg communicatively involves both knowledge of or competence in the language and the capacity for implementing that knowledge.

Lg proficiency and C. C § An earlier framework for describing the measurement of lg proficiency: § Skills & components models such as those proposed by (Lado, 1961& carroll, 1961 b, 1968). § These models distinguished skills from components of knowledge.

Shortcomings of skills & components model • Did not indicate how skills and knowledge are related. • Its failure to recognize the full context of lg use- the context of discourse and situation. • Halliday's lg functions(1976), van Dijk`s delineation of the relationship between text & context (1977) & Hymes ` recognition of sociocultural factors(1972 b, 1973, 1982):

What has emerged from these ideas is an expanded conception of lg proficiency whose distinguishing characteristic is its recognition of the importance of context beyond the sentence to the appropriate use of lg. § There is a dynamic interaction between context & discourse and communication is more than simple transfer of information.

Definitions • Hymes (1972 b) describes lg use as follow: • The performance of a person is not identical with a behavioral record. It takes into account the interaction between competence, competence of others, and the cybernetic and emergent properties of events themselves.

Savignon(1983) characterizes communication as: • Dynamic rather than static. It depends on the negotiation of meaning between two or more persons. It is context specific. Communication takes place in an infinite variety of situations, and success in a particular role depends on one's understanding of the context and on prior experience of a similar kind.

Kramsch(1986): communicative interaction • Interaction always entails intended meanings, anticipating the listener's response and possible misunderstandings, clarifying one's own and the other's intentions and arriving at the closest possible match between intended, perceived, and anticipated meanings.

• Recent formulations of communicative competence include, in addition to the knowledge of grammatical rules, the knowledge of how lg is used to achieve particular communicative goals, and the recognition of lg use as a dynamic process.

• Communicative lg ability: Consisting of both knowledge, or competence, and the capacity for implementing that competence in appropriate, contextualized communicative lg use. • Candlin (1986) has described C. C as follow: • A coming together of organized knowledge structured with a set of procedures for adopting this knowledge to solve new problems of communication that do not have ready-made and tailored solutions.

A theoretical framework of communicative lg ability (Bachman 1990) • The framework of CLA includes 3 components: • Language competence • Strategic competence • Psycho physiological mechanisms

• The first component is made up of various kinds of knowledge that we use in communicating via lg. • The second and third components include the mental capacities and physical mechanisms by which that knowledge is implemented in the community.

Components of communicative language ability in communicative language use • KNOWLEDGE OF STRUCTURES KNOWLEDGE OF LANGUAGE • STRATEGIC COMPETENCE • • PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGICAL MECHANISMS CONTEXT OF SITUATION

Language competence • Munby`s theoretical framework of C. C includes: • Linguistic encoding (the realization of lg as verbal forms) • Sociocultural orientation (contextual appropiracy & communicative needs) • Sociosemantic basis of linguistic knowledge • Discourse level of operation

• Canale& Swain (1980): • Distinguished “grammatical competence” from “sociolinguistic competence”. • Canale(1983): • Makes a further distinction between sociolinguistic competence and discourse competence. • Hymes(1982) in his notion of linguistic competence include: • Resource grammar/Discourse grammar& Performance style

• Attempts have been made to validate these components. • Allen et al. (1983): Developed measures of grammatical competence, discourse competence & sociolinguistic competence. • The factor analysis of their test scores failed to support the factorial distinctness of these particular components.

• Bachman &Palmer(1982 a): found support for the distinctness of components of what they called communicative proficiency. • They developed a battery of lg test included grammatical competence, pragmatic & sociolinguistic competence. • Results: Components of grammatical & pragmatic competence are closely associated with each other while sociolinguistic competence is distinct.

Components of language competence LANGUAGE COMPETENCE ORGANIZATIONAL COMPETENCE GRAMMATICAL COMPETENCE TEXTUAL COMPETENCE PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE ILLOCUTIONARY COMPETENCE SOCIOLINGUISTIC COMPETENCE

Organizational competence • Controlling the formal structure of lg for producing or recognizing grammatically correct sentences, comprehending their propositional content. Grammatical & Textual are 2 types of this competence.

Grammatical Competence • Producing structured, comprehensible utterances. Includes those competencies involved in lg usage. It consists of competencies such as the knowledge of vocabulary, morphology, syntax and phonology/graphology.

Textual Competence • Includes the knowledge of the conventions for joining utterances together to form a text, which is essentially a unit of languagespoken or written- consisting of two or more utterances or sentences that are structured according to rules of cohesion and rhetorical organization.

• Cohesion: Ways of explicitly marking semantic relationships such as reference, sub situation, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. • Rhetorical organization: The overall conceptual structure of a text, and is related to the effect of text on lg user. Its conventions include common methods of development such as narration, description, comparison, classification and process analysis.

• Ways in which interlocutors organize and perform the turns in conversational discourse, may be analogous to the rhetorical patterns that have been observed in written discourse. So, you can see that textual competence is also involved in conversational lg use. • These conversational rules can be best described in terms of the abilities associated with textual competence.

Pragmatic Competence • What is important in communicative lg use is the relationship between signs and referents on one hand the lg uses and the context of communication on the other. The description of this relationship constitutes the domain of pragmatics. • Pragmatics is concerned with the relationships between utterances and the functions that speakers or writers intend to perform through these utterances.

• Van Dijk(1977) described pragmatics as follow: • Pragmatics must be assigned an empirical domain consisting of conventional rules of lg and manifestations of these in the production and interpretation of utterances. In particular, it should make an independent contribution to the analysis of the conditions that make utterances acceptable in some situation for speakers of the language.

• Van Dijk distinguishes 2 aspects of pragmatics: • The examination of the pragmatic conditions that determine whether or not a given utterance is acceptable to other users of the lg as an act, or the performance of an intended function. • The characterization of the conditions that determine which utterances are successful in which situations.

• Pragmatic competence includes the types of knowledge which, in addition to organizational competence, are employed in the contextualized performance and interpretation of socially appropriate illocutionary acts in discourse. These competencies include the knowledge of lg functions and sociocultural rules.

Strategies by which a speaker can signal his intent in performing an illocutionary act • Directly by announcing its illocutionary force • Using an appropriate syntactic form, such as the imperative in “leave” • To be less direct: Using a sentence type whose form is not generally associated with the given illocutionary act and whose interpretation depends on the circumstances under which the act is performed.

Faster & Nolan (1981) : 18 strategies for requesting • Here are 5 examples of these strategies: • By announcing the intent to perform the act • By using an imperative sentence, which conveys the intent • By expressing a consequence of the heares acting • By asking if the hearer has the ability to act • By asking if the hearer has a reason for not acting

Language Functions Halliday (1973, 1976) • Ideational function: The most persuasive function in lg use, by which we express meaning in terms of our experience of the real world. Use of lg to express propositions or to exchange information about knowledge or feelings. for example, lg is used ideationally to present knowledge in lectures or scholarly articles.

• Manipulative Function: The purpose is to affect the world around us. Get someone to do sth by forming request, warning, … • Instrumental function: Use lg to get things done. • Regulatory function: Is used to control the behavior of others- to manipulate the persons and the objects in the environment. It is also used in formulating and stating rules, laws, and norms of behavior.

• Interactional function: Use lg to form, maintain, or change interpersonal relationships. • Any act of interpersonal language use involves 2 levels of message: context & relationship.

• Haley (1963) makes this point: • When any two people meet for the first time and begin to establish a relationship, a wide range of behavior is possible between them. As the two people define their relationship with each other, they work out what type of communicative behavior is to take place in this relationship. Every message they interchange by its very existence either reinforces this line or suggest a shift in it to include a new kind of message. In this way the relationship is mutually defined by the presence or absence of message interchanged by the two people.

• Heuristic Function: Use of lg to extend our knowledge of the world around us, and occurs commonly in such acts as teaching, learning, problem solving, and conscious memorizing. • This function also pertains to the use of lg for the purpose of extending one` s knowledge of lg itself, that is, for acquiring or learning a language.

• Imaginative function: Enables us to create or extend our own environment for humorous or esthetic purposes. For example telling jokes, constructing and communicating fantasies, attending plays or film and reading literary works such as novels.

Illocutionary Competence • Illocutionary competence is used both in expressing lg to be taken with certain illocutionary force and in interpreting the illocutionary force of lg. • One interpret sentences by assigning to each an illocutionary force.

Sociolinguistic competence • The appropriateness of lg functions and how they are performed varies from one lg use context to the next, according to a myriad of sociocultural and discoursal features. • Sociolinguistic competence is the sensitivity to, or control of the conventions of lg use that are determined by the features of the specific lg use context; it enables us to perform lg functions in ways that are appropriate to that context.