COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE

Concept of communicative competence

"The term «communicative competence» is comprised of two words, the combination of which means «competence to communicate». This simple lexicosemantical analysis uncovers the fact that the central word in the syntagm «communicative competence» is the word «competence». «Competence» is one of the most controversial terms in the fi eld of general and applied linguistics. Its introduction to linguistic discourse has been generally associated with Chomsky who in his very infl uential book «Aspects of the Theory of Syntax» drew what has been today viewed as a classic distinction between competence (the monolingual speaker-listener’s knowledge of language) and performance (the actual use of language in real situations). (...) Canale and Swain (1980) and Canale (1983) understood 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 fulfi l communicative functions and knowledge of how to combine utterances and communicative functions with respect to discourse principles. In addition, their concept of skill refers to how an individual can use the knowledge in actual communication. According to Canale (1983), skill requires a further distinction between underlying capacity and its manifestation in real communication, that is to say, in performance."


Jelena Mihaljević Djigunović
University of Zagreb

Since Communicative competence refers to the ability to converse with a native speaker of the target language in a real-life situation, emphasising on communication of ideas rather than on correctness of language form, the following video gives us a clear idea about those "difficulties" Spanish may bring to foreign speakers according to the region or country where it's spoken. In short, one thing is to speak Spanish, another is to be competent in Spanish. Moreover, these so called "differences" are also present in other languages; for instance, Portuguese from Portugal and it's homonymous from Brazil; or the English spoken in The US versus  the Canadian, South African or the one from the UK...Like this we could go on talking about the francophone countries, they all have a tendency and a particular choice for words. So, with no further introduction, here's "¡Qué difícil es hablar el español!":