So, grammatical competence doesn’t stand for communicative competence, while communicative competence should include grammatical competence. Obviously, there is no grammatical mistake in your answer, but the purpose of communication fails. T: Could you tell me the way to cinema, please? For example, in the street, a stranger asks you the way: Therefore, to make a distinction between usage and use is needed. In China, communicative approach was developed in 1960.ġ) In communicative approach, the main features of it are as follows:Ī) Communicative approach argues that language is an instrument for communication and learning language should include language use as well as language forms. Hymes’s theory of communicative competence deeply affects the domain of language teaching and challenges traditional teaching approaches. Linguistic competence is highly abstract, while communicative competence focuses on practicality. In his view, the concept of competence should include language use as well as sentence creation and a speaker needs to know how to be communicatively competent in a speech community. Then in 1972, Hymes put forward the concept of communicative competence.

But a growing number of researchers regard it as an idealized notion, therefore, it is inadequate. In Chomskey’s point of view, linguistic competence can be seen as an innate biological function of mind that allows individuals to produce the indefinitely large set of sentences that constitutes their language. He put forward this term partly to contrast with Chomskey’s linguistic competence. The term communicative competence is first put forward by Hymes (1972), an American sociolinguist. An Exploration of Communicative Competence In this paper, the writer argues that communicative approach founded on the basis of communicative competence is not a panacea and the role of sociolinguistics in language teaching is to provide the learners’ sociolinguistics awareness.Ģ.

It reflects function and communicative uses of language. Language education involves not only the elaboration of a grammatical system, but also the ability to use language as an instrument for learning and the ability to use language appropriately in varying contexts. This made second language specialists look to sociolinguistic research for developing teaching methodologies and enlarging the area of objectives of language education.

Since the late 1960, sociolinguists have paid their attention to naturally occurring language use.

Sociolinguistics pdf