穨Review. Pdf

Performance referred to how native speakers use that knowledge to produce and understand utterances 
(Richards, Platt & Platt, 1992:269).

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language teaching (Hymes, 1979). First, Hymes made the critical shift away from 
Chomsky’s abstract mental structures of language to its social and cultural aspects.
Secondly, Hymes (1979) realized that just as culture allows us to make sense of 
experience, so did language itself: the communicative event was the metaphor, or 
perspective, basic to rendering experience intelligible (Hymes, 1979). Hymes 
referred to the combined aspects of communication and culture in language as 
communicative competence, which meant knowledge and ability with respect to: 
l Whether (and to what degree) something was formally possible; 
l Whether (and to what degree) something was feasible in virtue of 
the means of implementation available;
l Whether (and to what degree) something was appropriate (adequate, 
happy, successful) in relation to a context in which it was used and 
evaluated; 
l Whether (and to what degree) something was in fact done, actually 
performed, and what its doing entails. (Hymes, 1979:19)
As the term spoke for itself, Hymes’ original concept of communicative 
competence was primarily sociolinguistic and it emphasized language use in social 
context. Nonetheless, it also embraced Chomsky’s psycholinguistic parameter of 
linguistic competence by including formal possibility along with feasibility for 
implementation, appropriateness to a context, and actual performance as defining 
components of communicative competence.
2.1.1.3 Canale & Swain’s Model 
Other theorists frequently cited for their views on the communicative nature of 
language were Canale & Swain (1980) and Canale (1983a). They identified four 
widely accepted dimensions of communicative competence: grammatical competence, 
sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, and strategic competence.

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Grammatical competence concerned with the mastery of the linguistic code itself.
Discourse competence concerned with the combination of form and function to 
achieve a unified spoken or written text in different genres that consisted of cohesion 
and coherence. Sociolinguistic competence addressed the extent to which utterances 
were produced and understood appropriately in different sociolinguistic contexts 
depending on contextual factors. Strategic competence was composed of verbal and 
non-verbal communication strategies that might be called into action for two main 
reasons: (1) to compensate for communication breakdowns due to limiting conditions 
in actual communication or insufficient competence in one or more of the other areas 
of communicative competence; and (2) to enhance the effectiveness of 
communication (Canale, 1983a). 
2.1.1.4 Savignon’s Definition 
Along similar vein, Savignon (1972), who introduced the idea of communicative 
competence to foreign language teaching, originally defined communicative 
competence as the “ability to function in a dynamic exchange in which linguistic 
competence must adapt itself to the total informational input, both linguistic and 
paralinguistic, of one or more interlocutors” (p. 8). She included the use of gestures 
and facial expression in her interpretation and later refined her definition of 
communicative competence to comprise of the following qualifications (Savignon, 
1983):
l Communicative competence was a dynamic interpersonal trait that 
depends on the negotiation of meaning between two or more persons 
who share some knowledge of a language.
l Communicative competence applies to both written and spoken 
language.
l Communicative competence was context-specific. A 

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communicatively competent language user knows how to make 
appropriate choices in register and style to fit the situation in which 
communication occurs.
l Competence was what one knows. Performance was what one did.
Only performance was observable, however, it was only through 
performance that competence could be developed, maintained, and 
evaluated.
l Communicative competence was relative and depends on the 
cooperation of those people involved. 
Savignon’s principles about communicative competence might not be used 
directly in this study. However, many of the ideas were applicable in the 
development of the working model particularly designed for the participants involved 
in this study.
2.1.2 Pedagogical Implications of Communicative Approach 
With the documentation of communicative competence, a number of theories and 
models were developed and expanded in the field of applied linguistics, 
second/foreign language acquisition, and syllabus development (Shih, 2001). The 
concept of communicative competence then became robust (Sung, 1998) and 
eventually led to the production of so-called communicative language teaching (CLT) 
practices, which entailed the following pedagogical concerns: (1) appropriateness vs. 
grammaticality, (2) fluency vs. accuracy, and (3) active participation vs. passive 
reception. Each of these issues would be discussed in the following sections.