Importance Of Language Competence

You can 't make any achievement in the study of language if you don 't take ‘competence’ into consideration. The notion of competence first developed by the American linguist Noam Chomsky in the mid-1960s. According to him, competence refers to the speaker hearer‘s knowledge of his language. (TGG).Transformational grammar (TG). Furthermore, Chomsky states that competence is an idealized capacity or a person s subconscious linguistic ability to understand sentences, including sentences they have never heared before. (Competence as part of his foundation of generative grammar). Competence was actually introduced in the following well known and commonly quoted paragraph : ‘’ Linguistic theory is primarily concerned with the ideal speaker

Second, theoretical justification as it is a part of the systematic study of the learner’s language (Corder; 1981). By means of error analysis, teachers will have a general knowledge about students’ errors (Xie and Jiang; 2007). The analysis of second language learners proved to be useful in that it sheds light on some of the areas of difficulties faced by learners, and by providing reliable results upon which materials of remediation can be erected as maintained by Keshavarz (2008). Chiang (1981) in a study noted other pedagogical implications of Error Analysis: (1). Making use of the hierarchy of difficulty. (2).Making use of the contrastive observations. (3).The usefulness and need of remedial programs. (4).The development of error-based teaching materials and syllabus for use in the composition class. (5).Implication for individualized instruction. (6).Understanding the strategies for the learner. (7).Implications for teaching

Thus, there was no need to identify the source of errors or even the possibility of thinking of them as the product of an independent system. It was till the 1960s that new approaches, such as errors analysis, begun to come into view. Errors are perceptible deviations reflective of the current stage of the learner’s underlying competence (Larsen1992) . They are to be distinguished from mistake which are gapes or slips in performance due to fatigue excitement..One of the characteristics of errors is that they cannot be auto-corrected unlike mistakes. According to Corder: A learner’s errors are important in three different ways . First, to the teacher in that they tell him, if he undertakes a systematic analysis, how far towards the goal the learner has progressed and, consequently, what remains for him to learn. Second, they provide to the researcher evidence of how language is learned or acquired, what strategies or procedures the learner is using in his discovery of the language. (Corder S. P. (1967). “The significance of Learners’ Errors”.( International Review of Applied Linguistics 5: 161-169) .Thirdly, they are indispensable to the learner himself because we can regard the making of error as a device the learner uses in