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Competence and Use

Communicative vs. Linguistic

  • Communicative competence is "everything that a speaker needs to know to COMMUNICATE appropriately within a particular community"

Linguistic competence is knowledge that is REQUIRED for appropriate use of specific components and levels of a language.

Communicative competence combines the knowlege of language (linguistic competence) and knowledge that is required for its appropriate use in communicative activities.

Knowledge of culture includes: content, context, linguistic elements and an understanding of wider societal structures

Pragmatic competence

Includes the ability to use language appropriately and knowledge that affects choices speakers make and contraints they encounter in using language in social interaction.

This chapter addresses three basic questions:

1) WHAT knowledge of language is required for different types of language use?

2) HOW are activities in L2 reading, listening, writing, and speaking achieved?

3) WHY do learners reach different levels of proficiency in language use?

L2 competence is usually more restricted and serves a more limited range of needs, depending on the context.

Each motivation for learning an L2 involves different combinations of linguistic and cultural knowledge and different levels of profiency.

Academic competence vs.

Interpersonal competence

Learners with an academic goal should be concerned with content-specific vocabulary, developing academic listening skills and proficiency in L2 academic writing.

Acquiring vocabulary is the most important level of language knowledge for learners with an interpersonal goal.

Speaking and listening are likely to play dominant roles in interpersonal production and interpretation.

Receptive vs. Productive

Receptive activities involve interpreting the meaning of others by reading and listening.

Productive activities involve communicating meaning to others by writing or speaking.

Written vs. Oral

ORAL activities have the highest priority

for interpersonal competence (speaking and listening).

DISCUSSION

In your own studies of an L2 , which competence was stressed? Considering your goals as a learner, was it the right one for you?

Linguists have traditionally divided language into five components...

1) Vocabulary (lexicon)

2) Morphology (word structure)

3) Phonology (sound system)

4) Syntax (grammar)

5) Discourse (ways to connect sentences and organize information)

corpus linguistic analysis is an analysis of large collections of written and spoken texts to determine the relative frequency of different vocabulary items and gammatical patterns.

Vocabulary

The core vocabulary in every language includes function words.

Fuction words are a limited set of terms that carry primarily grammatical information.

Interpersonal situation can be subdivided into 2 categories:

  • Interactional - affective purposes
  • transactional - task-oriented purposes

Social context may dictate register

Lexical elements that vary in frequency by domain are IDIOMS, METAPHORS and COLLOCATIONS

These "chunks" of language are typically memorized as holistic units

"The Big Picture"

A ballpark guess

types of knowledge that contribute to effective use of context for vocabulary learning:

Linguistic knowledge: syntactic information; contraints on possible word meanings

World knowledge: understanding the concepts which the words represent; familiarity with related conceptual frameworks; awareness of social associations

MORPHOLOGY

Derivational Morphology

Add prefixes and suffixes to create new meanings ("derive" a new meaning)

Inflectional morphology

Word parts that carry meanings such as tense, aspect and number

Phonology

during the 2nd half of the 20th century there was a shift in interest from phonology to syntax

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in phonological perception and production

Proficiency in phonological perception and intelligible production are essential for successful spoken communication.

Transfer from L1 to L2 phonology occurs in both perception and production

VOT = voice onset time

Aspect of perception and production of speech segments which is related to the location of a phoneme boundary and to identification of initial stop consonants

Syntax

the process of acquiring syntax begins with recognizing that sentences are more than just combinations of words, and that every language has specific limits and requirements on the possible orders and arrangements of elements

Sentences in all languages consist of a subject and predicate, and the predicate includes a verb, or a verb and 1 or 2 objects, plus other phrases

But the order of these elements can vary drastically among languages...

S V O - English, Chinese, French, Russian

S O V - Japenese, Turkish, Persoan, Finnish

V S O - Irish, Welsh, Samoan, Zapotec

English: Grammatical number and gender for pronons, but the article does not have to agree

Speakers of Russian, Chinese and Japanese will find the English simplified "the" difficult to master because these languages lack an exact equivalent

Chinese speakers, and speakers of Asian languages, having to mark plural on nouns in English will be a challenge, since this is not done in these languages.

Academic competence requires processing much longer and more complicated sentences than does interpersonal competence

Syntactic Knowledge required for either competence require extensive input that is specific to the intended context of use.

Cohesion devices link one element of discourse to another, integrating them into a unified text.

At a macrostructural discourse level we go beyond linguistic elements to knowledge of organization features that are characteristic of particular genres.

Different genresare typically characterized by having different language community, involving different classes of participants, addressing different topics, and requiring different language style and organization.

Contrastive rhetoric: area of research that compares genre-specific conventions in different languages and cultures, with focus on predicting and explaining problems in L2 academic and professonal writing.

Discussion: Turn and talk with a neighbor about a difficult time acquiring one of the compentents of language in your own L2 learning experiences.

Receptive Activities

Comprehension of written and spoken language involes both bottom-up and top-down processing.

Top-down processing utilizes prior knowledge of content, context,and culture.

Content: background information about the topic that is being read or listened to; new information is percievd and interpreted in relation to this based.

Context: includes information learned from what has already been read or heard in a specific text or situation, and an understanding of the writer's intention and the discourse pattern being used.

Culture: includes an understanding of the wider social setting within which acts of reading and listening take place

For many learners , reading in the primary channel for L2 input and a major source of exposure to associated literature and other aspects of the L2 culture.

Grabes 6 component abilities and types of knowledge involved in reading...

Automatic recognition ability

Vocabulary and structural knowledge

Formal discourse structure knowledge

content/world background knowledge

Sythesis and evaluation processes/strategies

Metacognitive knowledge and comprehension monitoring

Difficulties in reading in academic settings:

  • reading to find info
  • reading for general understanding
  • reading to learn
  • reading to critique and evaluate

Beginning L2 reading

Depending on how much prior oral knowledge of the L2 that learnrs have before starting to read, rate of progress through beginning stages will vary greatly.

academic reading

Prerequisite L2 linguistic knowedge

Vocabulary recognition

Complex sentences structures and puncuation

Organization at the sentence level

Organization at the discourse level

LISTENING

listening accounts for most of the language input for L1 acquisition by children, but L2 learners often have less opportunity to hear the target language.

Productive activities

Writing

knowledge involved in proficient writing:

Formulating mental concepts that are to be expressed centrally requires content knowledge

Recognizing what content will be revelant for intended readers, and what will be shared versus new information, requires content knowledge

Contrusting text within socially defined conventions of expression also requires other aspects of culture knowledge

Many L2 learners feel more secure if they are given a model to follow in early stages of writing (controlled writing excercise)

The relatively formal register needed for most academic writing may conflict with the relatively informal register that is often emphasized in “communicative” language teaching.

SPEAKING

Speaking is a very important area of activity for L2 learning if they will be using the language for interpersonal purposes, whether these are primarily social or instrumental

SPEECH ACTS

Learning how to perform these acts in the L2 is central to language learning, a nd knowing when to deploy them is basic to what we have called pragmatic competence.

Knowledge of conversational structure

Knowledge of contextualization cues

Knowledge of communication strategies

Acquiring vocabulary is the most important level of language knowledge for learners with an interpersonal goal.

Function words are the core vocabulary in every language that primarily carry grammatical information.

There are also high frequency words that occur in every language and in a wide range of academic contexts.

  • conjuctions: and, but
  • Pronouns: he, she, it
  • Determiners: the, that, this

Strategic knowledge: control over cognitive resources

DISCOURSE

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