Competence and performance

Competence and performance

Teaching English as a Foreign Language I

HISTORY

Noam Chomsky: An American linguist, first introduced the concept of “performance” and “competence” as part of the foundations for his Generative grammar.

definitions

Person’s knowledge of his language.
• The system rules which a language user has mastered so that it would be possible for that user to produce and understand an infinite number of sentences and recognise grammatical mistakes and ambiguities
COMPETENCE
PERFORMANCE

A term used in the linguistic theory of transformational generative grammar, refer to language is seen as a set of specific utterances produced by native speaker.

COMPETENCE VS. PERFORMANCE

How do we know that students have learned a language? 

We can assess students using formative and summative assessments but

How do we know that students will actually be able to use their language in real-life, authentic situations? 

In short,

How do we know that our students are competent in the target language?

One way to judge this competency is through students’ performance. However, How do we know that this performance is an accurate measure of what students actually know? 

Questions

What is the difference between competence and performance?

• Chomsky separates competence and performance; he describes 'competence' as an idealized capacity that is located as a psychological or mental property or function and ‘performance’ as the production of actual utterances.

What is the difference between competence and performance?

• In short, competence involves “knowing” the language and performance involves “doing” something with the language. The difficulty with this construct is that it is very difficult to assess competence without assessing performance.