Summary of Article #4

Communicative Competence: A Pedagogically Motivated Model with Content Specifications

By: Celce-Murcia, Dőrnyei, Thurrell

    The authors in this article present the relationship between model of communicative competence and pedagogical specification of content for CLT not unified under a comprehensive, theoretical model of language teaching.  They believe that competence is a powerful source of insight about what needs to be learned for syllabuses writers, teachers, materials creators, and performance evaluators.  The article continues to present four authors with different reactions towards this model.  They are Chomsky, Dell Hymes and Canale & Swain. 
     In the version used by Canale, the model includes four components:
1. Grammatical competence refers to the knowledge of the language code 
2. Sociolinguistic Competence involves the mastery of the sociocultural code of language use
3. Discourse competence is the ability to combine language structure into different types of solid texts.
4. Strategic Competence is the knowledge of verbal and non-verbal communication strategies.
     Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei and Thurrell (CMDT) further refined the model by making finer distinctions inthe area of sociolinguistic competence.
 l. Linguistic Competence (not narrowly grammar)
 2. Strategic Competence (efficiency and recovery)
 3. Sociocultural Competence (non-linguistic knowledge for appropriate deployment of linguistic  
 4. Actional Competence (carrying out/understanding communicative intent by performing and interpreting speech acts and speech events)
5. Discourse Competence concerns the selection, sequencing of linguistic items to achieve a unified spoken/ written text.  Five components are suggested : cohesion, delxis, coherence, genre and converstional structure. 

      The article ends with a chart of a chronological evolution model which also includes  Canale &Swain and  Canale's models.