IV. Conclusion

    English language teaching is an interdisciplinary subject for which human communication is an important source. The communicative approach is no doubt a manifestation of how this theory can be applied in the students’ English learning. It is a good teaching method to improve the students’ ability of listening and speaking. We should appreciate what it has contributed to us. In China, there are really many problems in English teaching, we must adopt the communicative approach. Good teaching is just good communication, thus, English teachers should make the communicative teaching by communication and for communication.

The term communicative competence was coined by Dell Hymes (1967, 1972), a sociolinguist who was convinced that Chomsky's (1965) notion of competence (see Chapter 2) was too limited. Chomsky's "rule-governed creativity" that so aptly described a child's mushrooming grammar at the age of three or four did not, according to Hymes, account sufficiently for the social and functional rules of language. So Hymes referred to commu­nicative competence as that aspect of our competence that enables us to convey and interpret messages and to negotiate meanings interpersonally within specific contexts. Savignon (1983: 9) noted that "communicative competence is relative, not absolute, and depends on the cooperation of all the participants involved." It is not so much an intrapersonal construct as we saw in Chomsky's early writings but rather a dynamic, interpersonal construct that can be examined only by means of the overt performance of two or more individuals in the process of communication.

1. Grammatical competence is that aspect of communicative com­petence that encompasses "knowledge of lexical items and of rules of morphology, syntax, sentence-grammar semantics, and phonology" (Canale & Swain 1980: 29). It is the competence that we associate with mastering the linguistic code of a language, the "linguistic" competence of Hymes and Paulston, referred to above.

2. The second subcategory is discourse competence, the comple­ment of grammatical competence in many ways. It is the ability we have to connect sentences in stretches of discourse and to form a meaningful whole out of a series of utterances. Discourse means everything from simple spoken conversation to lengthy written texts (articles, books, and the like). While grammatical competence focuses on sentence-level grammar, discourse compe­tence is concerned with intersentential relationships.

3. Sociolinguistic competence is the knowledge of the sociocultural rules of language and of discourse. This type of competence "requires an understanding of the social context in which lan­guage is used: the roles of the participants, the information they share, and the function of the interaction. Only in a full context of this kind can judgments be made on the appropriateness of a par­ticular utterance" (Savignon 1983:37).

The fourth subcategory is strategic competence, a construct that is exceedingly complex. Canale and Swain (1980: 30) described strategic competence as "the verbal and nonverbal communica­tion strategies that may be called into action to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to performance variables or due to insufficient competence." Savignon (1983:40) paraphrases this as "the strategies that one uses to compensate for imperfect knowledge of rules—or limiting factors in their application such as fatigue, distraction, and inattention." In short, it is the compe­tence underlying our ability to make repairs, to cope with imper­fect knowledge, and to sustain communication through "paraphrase, circumlocution, repetition, hesitation, avoidance, and guessing, as well as shifts in register and style"