Canale And Swain's Communicative Competence Theory

For clarity and emphasis, this study is anchored on Canale and Swain’s (1987) communicative competence theory. According to Canale and Swain (1987), there is a need of communicative competence as a synthesis of an underlying system of knowledge and skill needed for communication. In their concept of communicative competence, ‘knowledge’ refers to the conscious or unconscious knowledge of an individual about language and about other aspects of language use. According to them, there are three types of knowledge: knowledge of underlying grammatical principles, knowledge of how to use language in a social context in order to fulfill communicative functions and knowledge of how to combine utterances and communicative functions with respect to discourse

It concerns the mastery of the language code itself - lexicon, syntax and semantics. Canale and Swain (1987) pointed out that grammatical competence will be an important concern for any communicative approach whose goals include providing learners with knowledge of how to determine and express accurately the literal meaning of utterances. They believe that knowledge of these rules will be crucial in interpreting utterances for social meaning, particularly when there is a low level of transparency between the literal meaning of an utterance and the speaker’s intention. While discourse competence concerns the mastery of how to combine grammatical forms and meanings to achieve a unified spoken or written text in different genres, the cohesion and coherence of utterances or sentences. It is used to refer to two related, but distinct abilities. Textual discourse competence refers to the ability to understand and construct monologues or written texts of different genres, such as narratives, procedural texts, expository texts, persuasive (hortatory) texts, descriptions and others. These discourse genres have different characteristics, but in each genre there are some elements that help make the

Widdowson suggests that the classroom presentation of language must ensure the acquisition of both kinds of competence by providing linguistic and communicative contexts. Linguistic context focuses on usage to enable the students to select which form of sentence is contextually appropriate while communicative context focuses on use to enable the students to recognize the type of communicative function their sentences fulfill. He suggests that the selection of content should be made according to its potential occurrence as an example of use in communicative acts rather than as an example of usage in terms of linguistic structure. Grammar must be based on semantic concepts and must help a learner to acquire a practical mastery of language for the natural communicative use of language. The communicative competence model emphasizes the importance of the four language skills since they are viewed as manifestations of interpreting and producing a spoken or written piece. With this framework as the basis and taking the intercultural component as the point of departure, a variety of activities in the four language skills are presented for teaching learners intercultural communicative