1. Communicative Language Ability

2. Communicative Language Ability
Communicative language ability includes the competence of language and the capacity for implementing this competence.

3. Language Proficiency and Communicative Competence
Early Models (Lado): distinguish skills (reading, speaking) from components of knowledge (grammar, vocabulary)
Later Models
Halliday (1976): language functions
Dijk (1971): delineation of the relationship between text and contest
Hymes (1972): socialcultural factors in the speech situation
Recognition of the dynamic interaction between the context and the discourse

4. Framework of Communicative Language Ability
Three components:
Language competence: specific knowledge of components used in communication
Strategic competence: mental capacity for implementing the components of language competence
Psychophysiological mechanisms: neurological and psychological process in the actual execution of language as a physical phenomenon.

5. Framework of Communicative Language Ability

6. Framework of Communicative Language Ability
Attempts to prove the validity of the components have not been successful.
Allen (1983) tried to measure grammatical competence (morphology and syntax) , discourse competence (cohesion and coherence) and sociolingistic competence (sensitivity to register), failed to support the factorial distinctness of these particular components.

7. Framework of Communicative Language Ability
Bachman (1982): grammatical and pragmatical competence are closely associated with each other, while sociolinistic competence are distinct.

8. Framework of Communicative Language Ability

9. Language Competence Organizational competence Grammatical competence
Vocabulary / Morphology / Syntax
Phonology/Graphology
Textual Competence
Coherence
Rhetoric
Organization

10. Language Competence Pragmatic Competence Illocutionary competence
ideational / manipulative / heuristic / imaginative
Sociolinguistic competence
sensitivity to dialect / register / naturalness / cultural references

11. Language Competence Grammatical Competence
Knowledge of vocabulary, morphology, syntax, phonology and graphology
These competences govern the choice of words to express specific significations, their forms, their arrangement in utterances to express propositions, and their physical realizations.

12. Textual Competence
Knowledge of the conventions for joining utterances together to form a text
Convention (Halliday): semantic relationships such as references, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion
Convention (Grice): given and new information
Conventions Of rhetorical organization: narration, description, comparison, classification, process analysis.
Conventions of conversational language: establishing, maintaining, terminating conversations, attention getting, topic nomination, topic development and conversation maintenance.

13. Pragmatic Competence
Organizational competence: the relationships among signs and their referents.
Pragmatic competence: the relationships between the language users and the context of communication, utterance and the acts or functions that speakers intend to perform through these utterances.
Van Dijk’s aspects of pragmatics

14. Pragmatic Competence
The examination of the pragmatic conditions that whether or not a given utterance is acceptable to other users of the language as an act, or the performance of an intended function
The characterization of the conditions that determine which utterances are successful in which situations.

15. Language Functions of Illocutionary Competence
Ideational function: we express meaning in terms of our experience of the real world.
Manipulative function: the primary purpose is to affect the world around us.
Heuristic function: extend our knowledge of the world around us.
Imaginative function: create or extend our own environment for humorous or esthetic purposes, where the value derives from the way in which the language itself is used.

16. Sociolinguistic Competence
Appropriateness of these functions and their varieties in language use context
Sensitivity to differences in dialect or variety
Sensitivity to differences in register
Sensitivity to naturalness
Ability to interpret cultural references and figures of speech

17. Strategic Competence
Interactional definition (Tarone: 1981): the mutual attempt by two interlocutors to agree on a meaning in situations where the requisite meaning structures do not seem to be shared. Problem: some communicative language use involves only one individual.
Canale and Swain (1980): the definition of strategic competence includes both the compensatory characteristic and enhancement characteristic.

18. Psycholinguistic Description of Strategies
Faerch and Kasper (1983): speech production includes a planning phase and an execution phase.
Planning phrase: communicative goals and planning process

19. Psycholinguistic Description of Strategies
Communicative goals: an actional element associated with speech acts, an modal element associated with the role relationship and a prepositional element associated with the content of the communicative event.
Planning process: interaction of three components—the communicative goal, the communicative resources and the assessment of the communicative situation.
Execution phase: neurological and physiological processes of implementation of the plan.

20. Bachman’s strategic competence
Assessment component
Planning component
Execution component

21. Assessment Component Identify the information
Determine what language competencies are at our disposal
Ascertain the abilities and knowledge that are shared by our interlocutors
Following the communication attempt, evaluate the extent to which the communicative goal has been achieved.

22. Planning Component
The planning component retrieves relevant items from language competence and formulates a plan whose realization is expected to achieve the communicative goal.

23. Execution Component
The execution component draws on the relevant psychophysiciological mechanisms to implement the plan in the modality and channel appropriate to the communicative goal and the context.