TOPIC 1: LANGUAGE SCIENCES AND COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE

Topic 1: Language Sciences and Communicative Competence

First, we had the study of language as a system and then, there were people who were interested in the study of language as art. But there were other perspectives, apart from language as a system and language as art. We are talking about language as communication: people should study the way people communicate with one another in different contexts (formal and informal).

Competence in linguistic communication consists on the ability to communicate with a communicative intention in goal. You always talk with a purpose (to do something with words, to perform a request so that someone does something for you). The idea is that language as behaviour is what teachers should pursue in their student. English should be perceived as communication so as to develop the oral and written skills with a purpose (language is used for something, to communicate).

What happens between education and language sciences?

-both of them are concerned with language and communication

-education has always looked for solutions to problems in the language sciences. In many cases, they couldn’t find the answers because linguistics is not the only science needed for teachers.

-Official documents talk about competence in linguistic communication, but this is different from the concept of communicative competence, since they have different origin and competence in linguistic communication is devoid of the connotations communicative competence has.

Bloomfield was a linguist at the end of the 19th century-beginning 20th century. He believed in behaviourism as a theory. This implies that a learner learns a language through mechanical repetitions (drills).

John Rupert Firth was a British linguist, pupil of Bloomfield. He broke with the idea of language as a mere system and saw meaning as what linguistics should focus on.

Moreover, he developed a study in phonetics which talks about the importance of communication, specifically in oral skills. He is related to Bloomfield but goes a step further because he starts theorising about phonemes having meaning by per se.

Chomsky thought we are born with an innate capacity to learn languages (Universal Grammar). Thus, according to him, language teaching is something individual and it doesn’t rely on the teacher. The crucial part to learn a language is the student innate abilities, and he didn't care about learning teaching, but he cared about language learning.

Then, the functional paradigm emerged. This paradigm views language as being more than grammar. Language is communication. So, here, you take into account the context, the interlocutor, the formal or informal nature of context…. and that’s what we should take into account when we teach English to our students. It emphasizes language as use, as communication. It also emphasizes the different functions of language (like a request, expressing emotions, giving an opinion (agree or disagree), the aesthetic function of language (making poems…), greetings, arguing…). All these are functions of language, and that’s what we should teach.

The functional or communicative paradigm includes different disciplines that can be divided into 3 different blocks:

A- Language philosophy or philosophical pragmatics (linguistics). They view language as behaviour. Here we have Searle and Austin, the creators of the Speech Act Theory. They are the first ones who said that language is not a system, is action, we do things with language. However, they did not take context into account.

B- Linguistic anthropology (anthropology) and sociolinguistics (sociology). They also view language as behaviour. On the one hand, regarding linguistic anthropology, we have scholars such as Hymes. The premise of Hymes was that language and culture cannot be separated, and the context of the situation is crucial to understand communication. On the other hand, inside sociolinguistics we can find Labov. He introduced key concepts such as language variety, linguistic community, standard language, dialects, register and diglossia.

C- Cognitive science: psycholinguistics (psychology). They view language as knowledge. Inside this group we can find Constructivism and Piaget (learners construct their knowledge based on their previous knowledge and on their interaction with the world), and also the Socio-cultural theory and Vygtosky (we learn language through interaction with other people).