If the evolutionary purpose of language is social, then language cannot be reduced to words and grammar rules. Language is not the end but a means to an end. And that end is communication, which refers to not only the knowledge and skills in language use but also of the context and its participants. In fact, context and people in it are as important as the language used to communicate. Communication competence therefore is the degree of successful triangulation of language, people and context.
But how can we operationalize this triangulation for it to be useful for training and education? This post will provide the first steps toward an answer.
Language ability vs Communicative competence
Over 40 years ago, Canale and Swain popularized the idea of “communicative competence”. Unlike the common understanding of language as being made of word bits and grammar glue, communicative competence sees language ability as multifaceted. In the last few decades, communicative competence has been expanded to contain the following facets:
- Linguistic (grammatical) competence: language rules and forms
- Sociolinguistic competence: appropriate social conventions of language use
- Strategic competence: strategies that compensate for a lack in both grammatical and sociolinguistic competences
- Discoursal competence: discourse organizing knowledge
- Pragmatic competence: how usage can have different pragmatic interpretations
- Intercultural competence: an open attitude towards and knowledge of one’s own culture as well as others’.
For the sake of simplicity, I will later propose a dynamic model of ELF communicative competence in which pragmatic and intercultural competence will be subsumed into the broader social umbrella term, sociolinguistic competence.
While a much more sophisticated model of communication, Canale and Swain’s model of communicative competence has still been criticized. Although language standards and norms have expanded beyond linguistic accuracy to include appropriacy, this is often taken as NS appropriacy (see Acar, 2005). But if English is an international lingua franca, is this assumption valid? After all, what is strategically, pragmatically and discoursally appropriate for Anglo American English speakers may not be appropriate for Japanese or Brazilians, especially in ELF situations. And why should it?
In this way, ELF researchers (like Jenkins, 2000) use “intelligibility” as the golden standard, and also recognize the importance of accommodation communication strategies, like repeating, rephrasing, and being cooperative (see Canagarajah, 2007). ELF communicative competence should not be a single or monocultural concept, but rather a dynamic interplay of different communicative competences that will depend largely on the context and people in it.
Where’s the Context?
The relationship and relative importance of the above-listed communicative competences depends on the context of communication. Unfortunately, context has been an unrecognized and “under-theorized notion” in linguistic research (Pennycook, 2010). But if it is taken into account in communication, context can help us realize that language and communication is not tied to national or international definitions but depends largely on the complexity of local interactions and individuals within a specific context. Communication contexts contain both people and situation and can be diagrammed as a quadrant like below, where the situation ranges from informal to formal and the involved people range from being similar to very different.
Let’s take an example of ELF business context: an antivirus software developer from the Phillipines and one from Taiwan are working together on a project. In terms of the above diagram, these developers’ communicative context is informal since they are working as colleagues, and because they share the same occupation and educational background relevant to the communication event at hand, they are, as people, similar. Their communicative context would thus be located in the bottom left quadrant of the above diagram.
Dynamic model of communicative competence
Although the notion of communicative competence as being composed of subcomponents is generally accepted, how these components interrelate and overlap with each other is a question difficult to answer empirically. The model I propose suggests that competence interdependencies and importance vary according to the communicative context.
To simplify this model, I take communicative competence to contain the 4 competences:
- Grammatical (or linguistic) competence (GC): the formal qualities of linguistic code (syntax and lexis)
- Discourse competence (DC): knowledge of the level of cohesion of extended (oral or written) texts, such as a business telephone inquiry or complaint – both of which may have different “scripts” in different cultures
- Sociolinguistic competence (SocC): appropriate usage of language depending on the people involved, such as when a student addresses a teacher in a high school class (I have collapsed pragmatic and intercultural competences into this term)
- Strategic competence (StratC): a back up when the other competences cannot provide the resources, such as when a speaker repeats or paraphrases to reduce uncertainty about his message.
The reason for proposing a dynamic model showing competence variability is to reveal the varying competences necessary for successful communication in different settings. The diagram below contains four context-quadrants (formal situation/different people; formal/similar; informal/different, informal/similar) and communicator’s communicative competence profile for successful communication for each context-quadrant. The different components of communicative competence will change in their significance to the communication event, so that a large circle means that that competence is more important for communicative success.
In informal communicative contexts with communicators that are members of a shared community (like family members, IT programmer coworkers), sociolinguistic competence (SocC) will be more important than grammatical competence for successful communication; on the other hand, in formal contexts where communicators are in the same community, like at a Q&A session at a linguistics conference, all four competences will be important, perhaps especially grammatical (GC) and discoursal (DC) ones. On the other hand, between people from different communities or groups, such as in an ELF business setting when a Malaysian sales rep is talking with a Japanese prospect, more formal contexts may demand greater discoursal (DC) and strategic (StratC) competences, while informal contexts may rely more heavily on strategic competence (StratC).
At the center of the four competence clusters is a scaled pentagon representing the overlap of the four competences and thus the overall communicative competence (CC). If more competences are required for communicative success (CC success), then the pentagon shape is larger. ELF users tend to rely more greatly on their strategic competence rather than linguistic/grammatical competence (Canagarajah, 2007), and so in this context, the size of the strategic competence circle is larger than the others’ but the overall pentagram size is smaller because the other competences are less important for communicative success. However, other contexts will require the activation of more competences (represented by a larger pentagram) to reach communicative success. The pentagram size thus indicates the probability of effective communication, where the larger the pentagon, the greater the need for more competences to be more fully activated. In this light, the chances of communicative effectiveness generally diminish in proportion to how different the communicators are (no shared communities for that communication event).
From model to contextualized practice …
If this context-grounded model of communicative competence is to be useful in educational and training contexts, outcomes and assessment criteria need to be operationalized. Broader evaluation criteria are needed for measuring communicative success and guiding training. Language education and communication training needs to move away from narrow standards of grammatical or linguistic competence and focus on communication that takes seriously the context and participants in the communicative event. Dynamic communication training involves developing different competences, but this will only happen if practice is also situated in meaningful contexts.
Assuming that ELF communication events tend to be transactional and goal-oriented in nature, exchanges can be evaluated in terms of how effectively and successfully the outcomes relate to the communicative goals in that context. Here, “effective” or “successful” outcomes can be understood as a combined function of 1. the intelligibility and comprehensibility of the received message, and 2. the efficiency of how it is conveyed, which in formal contexts may require strong grammatical and discoursal competences.
References
Acar, A. 2006. Models, Norms and Goals for English as an International Language Pedagogy and Task Based Language Teaching and Learning. Asian EFL Journal, 8(3): 174-191.
Canagarajah, S. 2007. Lingua Franca English, multilingual communities, and language acquisition. Modern Language Journal, 91, 923-939.
Canale, M., and Swain, M. 1980. Theoretical Bases of Communicative Approaches to Second Language Teaching and Testing. Applied Linguistics, 1: 1-47.
Jenkins, J. 2000. The phonology of English as an international language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pennycook, A. 2010. The future of Englishes: One, many or none? In A. Kirkpatrick (Ed.) The Routledge Handbook of World Englishes, pp 673-688. Routledge: London.
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