College of Education for Girls Dr. Mohamed Younis Mohamed بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم College of Education for Girls Department of English Dr. Mohamed Younis Mohamed Applied Linguistics 1433-1434 H 5th Level

Language and Communication Knowing a language What does it mean to know a language well and to use it successfully? Answers to this question vary considerably, both historically and culturally, and between individuals. The answers also depend on the perspective of the person (an academic linguist, a language user, or a language learner ) who is being asked the question. Such answers as the following may be expected: knowing a language implies native-speaker insight and fluency; an ability to produce sentences with no grammatical errors; the capacity to write expressively; ability to get your meanings across and do what you

do what you need to do, or is it a combination of these? Traditional grammar-translation language teaching assumed that knowing the rules of a language and being able to use them were one and the same thing. Nevertheless, there are many cases where someone knows the rules of a language but is still not a successful communicator. They may, for example, not use the language fast enough. Or they may understand what is being said and have something to say themselves, but still somehow fail to join in. Or perhaps their language seems too formal and old-fashion. Or they may understand the literal meaning of what is said, but not why it is said. In other words,

In other words, knowing the grammar and vocabulary of the language, although essential, is one thing. Being able to put them or use involves other types of knowledge and ability as well. Communicative Competence & Linguistic Competence The concept of communicative competence (a term coined by linguist Dell Hymes in 1972) grew out of resistance to the concept of linguistic competence introduced by Noam Chomsky (1965). Chomsky’s idea is that the human capacity for language, as illustrated by a child’s acquisition of the language around them, is not the product of general intelligence or learning ability, but an innate.

We are born with considerable pre-programmed knowledge of how language works, and require only minimal exposure to activate our connection to the particular language around us. In this view, the newborn infant brain already contains a Universal Grammar (UG) which forms the basis of competence in the particular language the child goes on to speak. This linguistic competence is seen as modular, that is to say separate from other mental ability. An influential attempt to define linguistic work/idea in opposition to Chomsky’s idea, was made by Dell Hymes. In his description of Communicative Competence in late 1960s, Hymes observes that

a person who had only linguistic competence would be quite unable to communicate. They would be a kind of social monster producing grammatical sentences unconnected to the situation in which they occur. What is needed for successful communication, as Hymes suggests, is four types of knowledge : 1.Possibility 2.Feasibilty 3.Appropriateness 4.Attestedness Although Hymes discussed these four types (please see pages 42-46 of Guy Cook), other linguists have their own insights into these types.

Michael Canale and Merrill Swain (1980) identified these four components of communicative competence: 1.Grammatical competence includes knowledge of phonology, orthography, vocabulary, word formation and sentence formation. 2.Sociolinguistic competence includes knowledge of sociocultural rules of use. It is concerned with the learners' ability to handle for example settings, topics and communicative functions in different sociolinguistic contexts. In addition, it deals with the use of appropriate grammatical forms for different communicative functions in different sociolinguistic contexts.

3.Discourse competence is related to the learners' mastery of understanding and producing texts in the modes of listening, speaking, reading and writing. It deals with cohesion and coherence in different types of texts. 4.Strategic competence refers to compensatory strategies in case of grammatical or sociolinguistic or discourse difficulties, such as the use of reference sources, grammatical and lexical paraphrase, requests for repetition, clarification, slower speech, or problems in addressing strangers when unsure of their social status or in finding the right cohesion devices. It is also concerned with such performance factors as coping with the nuisance of background noise or using gap fillers

Assignment No.2 Do either 1 or 2 1.Compare and contrast between LC & CC. 2.The Influence of CC on Applied Linguistics. Good Luck