Meaning Of Communicative Competence

Communicative Competence

Communicative competence is a broad term, which can be understood and interpreted in a number of ways. From the words, one can easily derive a meaning, the ability to communicate effectively, though this is a narrow meaning. The most generally accepted parts of this capability are grammatical proficiency, disclosure proficiency and sociolinguistic proficiency (Vance, 2015, 1). It can also be defined as the ability to which an individual is able to understand properly and use the language in question to communicate effectively in his or her social life. Communicative competence should be able to address four purposes; pass and receive information, tighten one's social circle, relay a person’s needs and wants and ensure

It can ideally be traced back to Dell Hymes in 1970s where he was reacting to Noam Chomsky’s work, which was described as being inadequate in distinguishing between competence and performance. This was a period where the strong emphasis was made on how knowledgeable people were in regards to linguistics. Dell Hymes version was then the alternative to Noam Chomsky’s work, which was considered more understandable, realistic and was covering a wide range of the linguistic field (ibid 1-2). Hymes defined communicative competence not only as an inherent grammatical competence but also as the ability to use grammatical competence in a variety of communicative situations. Communicative competence can be described as dynamic rather than static because it keeps changing with time. It is this characteristic that we get the understanding of how it has gradually developed to information communication and technology. Those in a position of communicating successfully are regarded as having communicative competence (Safriyani, 2009, 1, 7 & Vance, 2015,

Involving students in classroom activities such as problem-solving, role-plays improves the communication of students which gives them a chance to advance their competence skills. Acquisition of language is advanced when instructions which are form-focused and corrective feedback are given within a communicative context. Teachers can add the works of communicative competence to their communicative language teaching classrooms by adding formulaic language to tasks that are communicative, raising awareness to learners of the structural principles of use of language at the sentence level and beyond and also sequencing communicative tasks