Knowledge, Ability and Effective

Competence ----
When I think about competence I think about 3 words; knowledge, ability and effective. From the readings this week I have learned a few things about communicative competence. We read an article by Vesna Baraic and Jelena Mihaljevic Djigunovic called defining communicative competence. Even though I sum up this meaningful word, competence, with; knowledge, ability and effective, there is so much more to it. I can see a lot of thought, research and discussion has gone on through history to bring us to better understand competence . Many people contributed to our present day understanding of communicative competence. Chompsky separates competence and performance, he says competence is about knowledge and performance is about the actual use of language. Hymes brought a sociolinguistic perspective to Chompsky's view and defined communicative competence as an ability to grammatical competence in a variety of communicative settings and situations. Widdowson made a distinction between competence and capacity and he was the first to give more attention to real language use. According to Canale and Swaine there were 3 types of knowledge, knowledge of underlying grammatical principals, knowledge of how to use language in social contexts and knowledge of how to combine utterances and communicative functions in respect to discourse. Also skill had 2 distinctions; underlying capacity and real communication. Then Savigon became an influential thinker, she described communicative competence as the ability to function in a truly communicative setting. Dynamic and relative were key terms for her model. Bachman called communicative competence 'communicative language ability' and he and Palmer focused their definition in two broad ways, language knowledge and strategic competence. Because their model is clearer, more complex and coherent than others, it has been favorable. Their attention was specifically on the aspects of language use; achieving a communicative goal in a specific situation. Finally I read about the CEF 2001 model and it's additions to the way we can understand communicative competence. This model balances knowledge and use by weaving them together. Each component; language, sociolinguistic and pragmatic competences have 'ability to use' ridding on their backs so to speak.
I like to keep things simple and easy to understand, so this is the definition for competence that I've come out of this module with - to know and be able to use resulting in a desired effect. When I originally thought about the word competence, before I worked through this module, I defined competence as; to know and be able to do. After reading the article I saw something was missing from my definition so I took the goal focus from Bachman and Palmer and changed the way I defined competence by adding "to use with a desired effect" as part of my definition. For me I see it clearly that the goal of communicative competence is about combining knowledge learned and  the ability to use  the language in the desired situations, with the desired effect.


And here is a picture just for fun .... to break up the bla bla bla.:)



















Sometimes I feel like this flower.