The Chomskys Notion Of Competence

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

CHAPTER 1

The scientific history of communicative competence began in the 1960s as a counter-movement against the ‘’linguistic competence’’ introduced by the structural linguist Noam Chomsky in contrast to the concept of ‘’linguistic performance.’’ Dell Hymes (1972) argued that Chomsky’s concept could not serve as a relevant component in real-life communication. He founded the idea of communicative-competence and proposed the term (communicative competence) in the same way as Chomsky does with linguistic competence. Dell Hymes, among others, makes use of the term communicative competence in a sociolinguistic sense.

The topic of my research is derived from the term communicative competence that was coined by Dell Hymes in 1966 which involves knowing not only the language code but also what to say to whom, and how to say it appropriately in any given situation.

Canale and Swain (1980) defined communicative competence in terms of three components which are grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence. The focus of this research in communicative competence is the sociolinguistic competence, the appropriateness; knowing and understanding how to speak in certain circumstances.

One learns how to do conversation and interact verbally within specific contexts. It is understood that the emphasis is on the process of communication rather than just mastering language rules and language forms because the target language that is learned acts as a vehicle for classroom communication. The conversations that take place in a language classroom will affect the way students think and behave and it leads to different levels of understanding of the target language for different students of different cultural background.

Communication is how people use message to generate meanings within and across various cultures and contexts, channels and media. Communicative competence in terms of sociolinguistics competence in a language classroom involves the varieties of languages, different cultural norms, level of education, ethnicity, status, gender, and age. It plays a vital role in language classroom to promote strong and active interactions as an approach to produce a communicative environment for teachers and language learners (students).

Cultures are a set of social values and attitudes with a characterize behavior and languages that they share and understand in a particular setting. Communication is the act of conveying information and ideas (spoken and written) through the exchange of facts, news, messages, feelings, desires, thoughts, and any means of information that can be communicated. In combination of culture and communication, all aspects of culture are relatively relevant to any form of communication and they are both inseparable pertaining to any social contexts, functions, processes and outcomes. The relationship of cultures and communication is the discovering of communicative patterns associated with many different networks of people in different situations.

The social functions and practices of a language are universal in a way that languages provide distinctive purposes such as the reason why the language is being used, the consequence of the use of a particular language, the meaning of its context in a communicative setting in a society. Thus, language is the development of basic human communications that can take place in many different forms besides non-verbal communication and gestures. Competence is the ability or a required knowledge and skill to accomplish a task in a proper way.

In addition to the competency of communication, language and social skills are closely related to one and another as social skills act as an intermediary between language development and communication skills. The learning of language enables humans to express themselves and to recognize the emotions of others by reading and accepting signals verbally and nonverbally to further manage social encounters more successfully. Effective communication is made possible with the use of language because language is created by people and there are meanings attached to words according to the way humans communicate with each other.

Communicative competence is ‘’the ability to interact well with others’’. The meaning of well refers to accuracy, clarity, comprehensibility, coherence, expertise, effectiveness and appropriateness. (Spitzberg, 1988). Following Grice (1975), Wiemann and Backlund (1980) specified four elements of appropriate communication - quantity, quality, relevancy, and manner of message sending. Quantity as in say just enough - not too little or too much; Quality as in do not say something that is false or speak about something for which you lack evidence; Relevancy as in relate your contribution to the topic and situation; and Manner of sending message as in be clear about what you are saying, and say it ‘’with dispatch’’. These criteria of appropriate communication are useful and helpful in making the desired communication more effective and purposeful. It is not just about sending messages in the process of communication but it is how we evaluate the contents and rephrase and fully understood the idea of the given message.

Statement of the Problem

In exploring communicative competence in a language classroom, it is an in-depth understanding of the varieties of languages, the preferred languages used, appropriate rules, skills and knowledge needed to convey information to get along well with others in facilitating communications and interactive conversations in a language classroom. It is not an easy task to learn and comprehend a language. Hence, classroom language functions as the routine language used between teachers and students such as giving instructions and asking questions during lessons.

There are bound to be problems faced by teachers and students in an effort to create a conducive and authentic classroom language where active and effective communication takes place. Teachers might find it hard to integrate classroom learning while students sometimes encounter problems when the target language does not make sense in their mother tongue. For that reason, students must understand and learn to adapt and accept that different languages work in different ways because different cultures have their own distinctive features that serve different communicative functions. Therefore, by learning a new language and making use of the language to build and maintain cultural connections, students do not need to rely on their mother tongue so much but instead it increases the usage of the target language that they are learning.

This research is designated to observe the process of communication that takes place in a language classroom and acknowledging what actually takes place in the classroom where patterns of communication are established and maintained.

To look further into the study, it is important to understand why students uphold the values and cultures of their language and they find it difficult to speak up in a new environment. The dynamic of classrooms communications of students’ different cultural backgrounds makes it complicated to specifically analyze what are the problems that teachers and students mainly come across every day. Language students come to classrooms with knowledge and use of language that guides them to thoroughly understand and participate in the world around them. This knowledge is acquired within the linguistic, social, and cultural context of their real-life experiences and represents the means through which these students use language to make sense of and interact with those around them.

Research Questions

What are the problems that the teacher and learners (students) will face in daily interactions among themselves due to the cultural and language gaps?

How effective communication does takes place despite the various background differences of the students with the teacher especially in a multicultural society?

Objectives of the Study

The objectives of this research are as follows:

To observe the competency of communications in a language classroom and to understand the difficulties of communications that takes place within a group of students in a multicultural society.

To examine the patterns and the flow of communications in the classroom by identifying the differences of cultural knowledge, linguistic knowledge and interaction skills.

Significance of the Study

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of communication in many ways in expressing feelings and needs to identify and avoid obstruction to effective communication to make our lives and the people around us better. Good communication is the key to a good relationship. Therefore, communication should not be overlooked and underestimated as it is the door that leads to a harmonious and successful connection among humans. This research paper is designated to raise awareness especially in academic institutions in a multicultural society with people that come from different backgrounds. This way, undergraduates can prepare themselves for a higher challenge in the future when they move into the working class society where they are able communicate and perform well.

This is a beneficial study especially to the language teachers and language students in UCSI University because it involves the issue of communication that takes place every day in a classroom whereby teachers and students are the participatory audience. By exploring communicative competence, it helps teachers and students to realize the differences of channels of communication due to the varieties of languages and it enhances the relationship among them by generating effective and meaningful conversations (inside and outside of classroom) in the future. More importantly, if one learns, acquires and develops the appropriate knowledge and skills in communicating competently, it helps to build one’s self-esteem by being more assertive and conscious of the phenomenon of communication that occur in any place and any time.

Scope and Limitations of the Study

This research focuses on the competency of communication specifically conversations in daily life where communication breakdowns are most likely to happen that may lead to misunderstanding and misconception among people. It is not a surprise that communication breakdown occurs due to cultural and language gaps because social interactions are very complex in achieving goals of communication.

However, by observing, evaluating and analyzing communications that takes place in a language classroom is not sufficient to determine the patterns and the various social skills that contribute to effective communication. It is the cultural and social information that is encoded via different channels of communication in a specific setting (language classroom). The limitation of this study is that the competency of communications can be observed not just in language classrooms but also any other teaching classrooms that active interactions occur between the teacher and learners.

Definition of Terms

Communication Competence – It is the ability to communicate and interact with interpersonal skills and to socialize to get along well with people.

Social Skills – Skills that are needed to interact and get along well with people.

Communicative Functions – Communicative and expressive ways of using language to make meaningful and purposeful communication.

Comprehensibility – The accuracy and degree of comprehending language or thought.

Language Classroom – Classroom learning to discover language and communications facts.

Cultural context – Ideas and beliefs shared by individuals within a community that eventually affects the way they behave and patterns of communication.

Social Interaction – Social contacts and social relations derived to create active communication.

Effective Communication – A desired result of intentional sharing of information to understand issues in order to successfully understood the whole idea.

Linguistic interaction – Interdisciplinary approach to grammar and the sociology of language in the field of linguistics.

CHAPTER 2

LITERATURE REVIEW

Theoretical Background

The purpose of this chapter is to highlight a theoretical perspective or framework, which will be based mainly on the concept of communicative competence, focusing on the patterns of communication with a variation of languages within a language classroom. This paper will slightly touch on sociolinguistics that studies how language varieties differ with different group of ethnics, religions, level of education, age and gender. It entails a significant part of the linguistics domain, engaging with language as a social and cultural phenomenon that varies from place to place. It also looks into the field of language and society whereby both of them are inter-related in all possible situations in daily occurrence of conversations. The choices of languages and the appropriate skills that we use to communicate either verbal or non-verbal, whenever we try to interact, with words or gestures, we make sure that our listeners are able to interpret meanings out of it.

Communicative competence is the ability to use the language system appropriately in any circumstances, with regard to the functions and varieties of language, as well as shared socio-cultural suppositions. Dell Hymes (1972) argued that Chomsky’s concept could not serve as a relevant component in real-life communication. Hymes founded the idea of communicative-competence and proposed the term (communicative competence) in the same way as Chomsky does with linguistic competence. Dell Hymes, among others, makes use of the term communicative competence in a sociolinguistic sense.

In countering Chomskyan linguistics, in proposing the ethnography of communication, Hymes has always centered his theory and practice on what real human beings do with language. It is vital that language learners become culturally aware of their own culture and of others’ cultures as different language learners have different perspectives and understandings on the world views of other cultures based on their very own cultures, meanings and interactive skills.

(Saville-Troike, 1989, 1996) divides the central construct of communicative competence into three types of knowledge: linguistic, interactional, and cultural knowledge. Saville-Troike is in line with Hymes’ notion of communicative competence considering the aspect of second or foreign language contexts. Communication patterns vary from the way people speak and the way the message is being conveyed which brings meaning on many different contexts. Patterning occurs at all levels of communication: societal, group, and individual (cf. Hymes 1961). Generally, languages are made to act as a social identification within a society. The meaning is therefore in the act of communication. It functions in a way that different level of people will have different types of communicative style depending on the gender, age, and social status. This is to identify themselves as well as others because the process of communication generates distinctive behavioral patterns that create multiple layers of meaning beyond utterances. For example, a teacher has a different approach of communicating compared to doctors or lawyers.

In a cross-cultural communication, most multilinguals have a wider range of options for accomplishing communicative goals, including a capacity for style shifting and style creation or blending (depending on desired audience effect) which exceeds monolingual competence (Hanks 1986; Kachru 1987). A multilingual communication is special in its own way as it develops when people of different languages needs to interact using the only shared common language. Interactions and active conversations is not just about grammatical knowledge and rules but more to using a common language to communicate with appropriate acquired knowledge on how and when to use utterances in a particular setting.

Sociologists discover the techniques of communication in human beings. While language and culture are closely inter-related, it is of utmost importance in knowing the formal structure of a language in order to understand certain contexts of conversational interaction especially in a multicultural classroom. The diversity of classrooms setting are unique in its own way such as the differences of personality, linguistics competency, level of reading and writing, and the list goes on. By making sure that active interaction takes place within the classroom of multicultural students in a conducive environment with teachers constantly encouraging the use of language and communicative skills, students will then be motivated and are well-prepared to participate in a heterogeneous and complex society.

Language teachers teach in many different contexts and it is important for them to acquire the appropriate contextual knowledge, specifically the social context which includes personal backgrounds, cultural backgrounds, and classrooms rules, so as to develop the norms of communicative practice that will be very useful in the future. By being able to communicate culturally in an effective way, it enables us to respect and accept the differences of culture so as to achieve the common goals of a conversation between two different parties within the influences of each other’s culture. It produces a harmonious mutual understanding between two parties and it creates a sense of connection that share similar qualities of an interaction. Hence, teachers need to make sure that the classroom learning is conducive and the activities prepared are productive in order to gain cooperativeness from students. The challenges that the teacher and students frequently struggle with are inevitable because a mutual and responsive communication can only take place in an environment where both sides are at ease with one and another with good rapport and where communication occurs easily and naturally.

Theoretical Framework

Conceptual Framework

Communicative Competence in a Language Classroom

Communication competencies:

Observe the difficulties of communications between the lecturer and students.

Patterns of communications:

Identify the variation of languages and interactions skills in a multicultural classroom.

Communicative Competence

Linguistic knowledge (Language variation)

Cultural knowledge

Social skills (Interaction skills)

To explore the knowledge, beliefs, and skills that language teachers use to communicate with students, we should first identify the way they approach their work and how they manage classroom activities to make language classroom learning productive and effective. In the context of a university classroom engagement, social status such as genders, age, religions and race of students and teachers do play an important role in defining the diversity of the classroom that can enhance the learning environment.

Communicative competence is that aspect of our competence that enables us to convey and interpret messages and to negotiate meanings. There are cognitive statements that will be used to evaluate and develop response rates so that the outcome of the study can be measured and classified. Thus, the backgrounds, world knowledge and experiences are of importance to match the level of communication to competency. As language is learned and used for a variety of purposes, we use it to convey to others of what we have in mind, information, thoughts, feelings, and desires to maintain a quality communication in order to reach the goal of conversation. Therefore, the competency of communication in a language classroom is observed and evaluated in determining the underlying behaviors and attitudes towards language and social skills.

The art of communication is just like making someone to get the intended message (to get through the meaning). So when particular settings of participants are interacting, the uses of different languages are able to show a speaker’s linguistic repertoire whether or not they are monolingual of bilingual. Most bilinguals tend to use more than two languages while monolinguals speak only their mother tongue and they sometimes face difficulties in expressing themselves by using another language to communicate with people who share the same second language or target language. Even so, it does not mean that they cannot communicate at all with a language that is foreign to them. Monolinguals might not be able to speak fluently due to the grammatical and sentence structure, they allow themselves to accommodate into situations if need be. For example, they can easily borrow words and imitate the pronunciation of a word that they do not understand at all as long as they are able to transmit the messages to the other person who understand what they are trying to say.

Existing Research

Theories of communicative competence emphasize the importance of communication as humans use language in various contexts to interact and to negotiate meaning in everyday life. By using language to interact, it means using the appropriate social skills and selected choices of languages to produce an interactive communication between one and another. Researches on teaching and learning languages have shown that the best way to communicate is through communication itself. Therefore in a language classroom, it is essential to preserve values and attitudes of our own culture and also to understand that different cultures functions distinctively with their own special characteristics.

In Bachman’s concept of Communicative Language Ability in Masashito Kamiya’s research paper, he stresses the importance of describing ‘’the process by which [the] various components interact with each other and with the context in which language use occurs’’ (Bachman, 1990: 81). Classrooms registers are bound to be more complex and sometimes tend to be very competitive as students come from different backgrounds communicate differently. The way people talk and produce utterances reflect on their own culture and not all gestures are acceptable at least to some minority of people. For example, simple way of greetings can be in various forms for different kind of cultures. When meeting someone for the first time, it is common to shake hands and greet each other but it is not common for people from other countries such as America, they generally hug each other and kiss (cheeks) upon meeting up.

In a classroom setting, the teacher is responsible for establishing situations that will encourage communication. In communicating, the speaker has a choice of not only what to say but how to say it. This way, students are given an opportunity to express their own ideas and opinions while mistakes they made in sentence structures are seen as positive feedbacks to develop better communication skills to use in future. At this point, the teacher-student or student-teacher relationship in an interaction becomes an important part of the lesson as both parties can take turns to become facilitators to motivate each other in learning the target language.

Communication is a process where someone else tries to convey a message and on the other hand try to understand the comprehended information. Cross-cultural issues in a language classroom are more or less sensitive among students. Certain acts and behaviors are related to cultural origin. Hence, we need to be aware of the cultural basis of our own behaviors, perceptions, and beliefs. As teachers and students work together, there are a lot of challenging tasks that may surface.

The conception of Chomsky’s perspective on Competence:

‘’ Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener, in a completely homogeneous speech-community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge of the language in actual performance.’’ (Chomsky, 1965: 3)

Talk is not "just a matter of individuals’ encoding and decoding messages" (Gumperz, 2001: 218), but also something by which conversationalists attempt to attain their communicative goals in real-life communicative exchange. As far as communicative competence is concerned, the cultural knowledge, interaction skills, and linguistic knowledge are still the essential materials in a language classroom of students.

Synthesis of Reviewed Studies

With regard to Chomsky’s notion of competence: what the speaker can do, in the special linguistic sense of what he can mean, is not the same as what he knows. Chomsky’s view on the perspective of language revolves around the idea that all humans have an internal capacity to acquire language. However, students have to be competent in expressing themselves in the way they choose to communicate although they have acquired communicative skills in a language. Considering factors like politeness and the intentions of sending a message, it is no wonder how a communication cannot take place between two people as there is no room for negotiation. For example, one may begin a conversation by asking the weather before moving on to the intended question. If one jumps straight into getting something that he or she needs to know, there are chances that the conversation would be awkward and it will affect the performance of the speaker in wanting to gain information. The relationship between a teacher and a student can be said to be formal and it requires essential social values that were instilled since young either at home with family or during schooling days where students are exposed to all patterns of interactions with teachers and friends.

Humans learn all kinds of language literacy since from the beginning of schooling. Language skills and social skills are inseparable but they can vary at times. For instance, a student can write very well with perfect English but when asked to speak in classroom, he or she finds it hard to form sentences and speak in a proper way. There seems to be errors or misconstruction of words. It could be that the student hardly uses the language in spoken form and lack the courage to fully maximize the language to comprehend meaning. Apart from that, it is possible that the student is shy and is afraid of making mistakes and demonstrating his or her ignorance publicly. They therefore refrain themselves from participating in social activities in school.

CHAPTER 3

METHODOLOGY

3.1 Research Design

This research paper is designated to conduct an in-depth understanding on the competency of communications in language classrooms. It is a systematic observation in a language classroom specifically on the patterns and the flow of communication between the teacher and the participating students focusing on the varieties and the implications of languages used and the appropriate social skills. The mutual relationship between teachers and students of different backgrounds in a multicultural society requires understanding diverse perspectives to encourage higher communication competency in a way that the environment of the classroom is socially interactive. Hence, this study of research will be collecting qualitative data based on observations of communication in language classroom with purposive items to be included.

3.2 Sampling Techniques

Maximal Variation sampling which is a purposeful sampling is used to look into the subject of the study and understand how the phenomenon of a language classroom of students are seen and understood in the university at different times. The goal of this research is to study a sample of participants with a selected population of the target language classroom.

An ethnographic research design that describes, analyzes, and interprets variation of languages, patterns of communications, and shared cultural values in the activities that were carried out in the process of communication between the language teacher and the students. The forms of ethnographic data that will be collected during the practical observation of the target classroom are surveys or questionnaires (indirect interview) on the language teacher and students, a checklist of interaction skills, linguistic knowledge, and cultural knowledge which will further break down into smaller elements that are considered to be important and contributing to the significance of the systematic observation.

3.3 Research Site

The site of this conducting research is in an enclosed environment - learning classrooms with ongoing lessons in an institution of higher education, UCSI University located in Cheras, Taman Connaught, Kuala Lumpur. The university offers courses in English and two major subjects in the academic program of English Language and Communication are namely Basic English and English Foundation. The selected subject for this research to be carried out will be English Foundation which consists of three groups of classes per week with approximately 20 students in a group for the May - August 2013 semester.

3.4 Participants of the Study

The participating audience is the language teacher with a classroom of students, focusing mainly on the communicative styles, patterns of interactions, and the varieties of languages that they use to interact most of the time in the English Foundation classroom. English Foundation includes a majority of international students in UCSI University such as students from the Middle East, China, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

3.5 Research Instrument(s)

The primary instruments of this research are of a list of checklist that was derived from references of past and present case studies from a few journals found online and the researcher further modify the observation checklist to construct and determine the level of communicative competence. Primary sources are from Saville-Troike’s inventory on the range of linguistic, interactional, and cultural phenomena for the description and explanation of communicative competence (Saville-Troike 2003) and the language proficiency factor in Competence and Performance in Language Teaching. (Jack C. Richards). The checklist is then further modified by the researcher to use it for the purpose of a language classroom in the perspective of education.

Observation (Communicative Tools)

Yes

No

Some

Comment

English is used as the medium of communication.

Comfortable zone of language learning among students.

Group interactions among students.

Relating cultural issues in discussions.

All students are given a chance to participate.

Teachers encourage interactive classrooms learning.

Students are confident to speak in the target language used.

Valuing others’ comments.

Arguing against ideas/opinions.

Teacher comprehends texts accurately.

A clarifying and conducive learning environment.

Enthusiasm in learning classroom.

To give explanations and instructions in the target language.

The teacher dominates the communication.

Students are responsive.

Teachers constantly provide help.

Teacher and students work in a group.

Diversity of classroom encourages positive interactions.

To provide language-enrichment experiences for learners.

Fluent usage of the target language.

Table 1 Observation Checklist

3.6 Data Collection

A descriptive and ethnographic type of study is a systematic observation of the ethnography of classroom concentrating on the attitude and behavior of the composition of the class that consist mainly international students and local students. It is the aim of the study to analyze the patterns of classrooms communications in terms of language and social skills while identifying the problems that will always surface especially in a multilingual society.

The observation checklists will be used to compare and contrast the competency of communication among groups of students and the teacher involved. It will show the level of frequencies and the specified calculation collected to identify the flow of the languages variation and feedback forms from a few selected students and the teacher to obtain quality and general information or opinions related to communicative competency. Dividing the components of observations, the findings will be able to show the influence of a multicultural setting with both local and international students in the aspects of linguistic abilities and appropriate social skills in surrounding network of interaction. The communicative tools will act as a catalyst to the experiment as they are all essential criteria that should be taken into strong consideration and also attributes to the exploration of communicative competence in language classroom.

3.7 Tentative Timetable

Months

Tasks

Remarks

April

May

June

July

August