THE COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE: IMPORTANCE AND DEVELOPMENT

Віта Лагодзінська

(Україна, м. Умань)

Modern specialists should be competitive, so they should have professional knowledge, formed corresponding practical skills and abilities. In addition, they should find out the high level of communicative competence, follow basic literacy norms in professional activity.

Language is the most important aspect in the life of all beings. We use language to express inner thoughts, emotions, make sense of complex and abstract thoughts, to learn to communicate with others, to fulfill our needs, as well as to establish rules and maintain our culture.

Language can be defined as verbal, physical, biologically innate and a basic form of communication. All human languages share basic characteristics, some of them are organized rules that produce all the possible correct sentences of the language.

Nowadays the communicative competence remains one of the main features of high professional qualification. The term “communicative competence” is comprised of two words, the combination of which means “competence to communicate”.

Recent theoretical and empirical research on communicative competence is largely based on three models of communicative competence: the model of Canale and Swain, the model of Bachman and Palmer and the description of components of communicative language competence in the Common European Framework (CEF).

In the model of Canale and Swain, strategic competence is composed of knowledge of verbal and non-verbal communication strategies that are recalled to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to insufficient competence in one or more components of communicative competence. These strategies include paraphrase, repetition, avoidance of words, structures or themes, guessing, changes of register and style, modifications of messages etc.

In Bachman and Palmer’s model, organizational knowledge is composed of abilities engaged in a control over formal language structures, i.e. of grammatical and textual knowledge. Grammatical knowledge includes several rather independent areas of knowledge such as knowledge of vocabulary, morphology, syntax, phonology, and graphology. They enable recognition and production of grammatically correct sentences as well as comprehension of their propositional content. Textual knowledge enables comprehension and production of (spoken or written) texts. It covers the knowledge of conventions for combining sentences or utterances into texts, i.e. knowledge of cohesion (ways of marking semantic relationships among two or more sentences in a written text or utterances in a conversation) and knowledge of rhetorical organization (way of developing narrative texts, descriptions, comparisons, classifications etc.) or conversational organization (conventions for initiating, maintaining and closing conversations).

In the CEF, communicative competence is conceived only in terms of knowledge. It includes three basic components – language competence, sociolinguistic competence and pragmatic competence. The aspects of this competence are, as follows: language elements that mark social relationships, rules of appropriate behavior, and expressions of peoples’ wisdom, differences in register, dialects and stress.

References:

1. Bachman, L.F. (1990). Fundamental Considerations in Language Testing. Oxford etc.: OUP.

2. Bachman, L.F., & Palmer, A.S. (1999). Language Testing in Practice: Designing and Developing Useful Language Tests. Oxford etc.: OUP.

3. Canale, M., & Swain, M. (1980). Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics, 1, 1— 47.