Aspects of the use of learners of mother tongue in foreign language teaching

Components of communicative competence

According to Canale and Swain, communicative competence consists of four components which are grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, and strategic competence. Together these four components suggest a model of communicative competence as a basis for curriculum design and classroom practice (Savignon, 1983:35).
Grammatical competence, according to Richards and Rodgers, “refers to what Chomsky calls linguistic competence […]. It is domain of grammatical and lexical capacity.” (2005:160). Sociolinguistic competence “refers to an understanding of the social context in which communication takes place.” (Richards and Rodgers, 2005:160), Discourse competence “is concerned with the connection of utterances to form a meaningful whole.” (Savignon, 1983:38) and finally Strategic competence “refers to the coping strategies that communicators employ to initiate, terminate, maintain, repair, and redirect communication.” (Richards and Rodgers, 2005:160).
Canale and Swain´s extension of the Hymesian model of communicative competence […] was in turn elaborated in some complexity by Bachman (1991). The Bachman model has been, in turn, extended by Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, and Thurrell (1997) (Richards and Rodgers, 2005:160).

There is also another distinction of communicative language components, which is provided by Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. It suggests a comprising of linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic competence (2004:13). According to this framework, linguistic competences are concerned with the lexical, phonological, syntactical knowledge and skills and other dimensions of language as a system. It relates not only to a quality of knowledge but also to cognitive organization, to the way how the knowledge is stored and to its accessibility. Sociolinguistic competences refer to the sociocultural conditions of language use, which are for example the rules of politeness, norms between sexes and classes, linguistic codification. Pragmatic components are related to the functional use of production of language functions and speech acts, discourse, cohesion and coherence, the identification of text types and forms and the impact of interaction (2004:13).

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