Page 34 - Second language development of newly arrived migrant kindergarteners - Frederike Groothoff

34 Chapter 2 2.3 Communicative competence Including both linguistic and sociolinguistic factors as well as classroom and second language educational perspectives has consequences for the way language development is assessed. Is language seen as a compilation of different aspects which can be assessed separately or is it seen in total, focusing more on communication as a whole? “If language is viewed as a social practice of meaning-making and interpretation, then it is not enough for language learners just to know grammar and vocabulary. They also need to know how the language is used to create and represent meanings and how to communicate with others and to engage with the communication of others” (Liddicoat & Scarino, 20013, p.15). This holistic view on language can be captured in the theory of communicative competence: Language is seen as communication and being able to communicate means being competent in many different facets of communication. Following Savignon (1976), communicative competence provides an inclusive description of the knowledge required to use language because communicative competence includes, in addition to the knowledge of grammatical structure, the knowledge of how language is used to achieve specific communicative goals. Communicative competence therefore means considering the communicative situation as a whole. In these communicative situations, mirroring ecological linguistics, other aspects are important: with whom, to whom, the relationship, the context, and the intent of communication. In the discussion among scholars about communicative competence terms have been redefined, renamed, or broken down into more specific terms. Hymes (1972) started by challenging Chomsky’s (1965) notion of “linguistic competence”, because besides knowing whether a sentence is grammatical, a child should also know whether or not it is appropriate: “There are rules of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless” (Hymes, 1972, p. 278). Savignon added that separate tests break down a skill into language elements, and as such ignore the complexity of the communicative setting (Savignon, 1976). Canale and Swain (1980) narrowed this notion of sociolinguistic interference down to strategic competence and sociocultural competence. Canale (1983) continued and separated discourse competence from sociocultural competence. Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, and Thurrell (1995) related their new model of communicative competence with the models of Canale and Swain (1980), Canale (1983), and Bachman and Palmer (1996). Celce- Murcia et al. (1995) separated actional competence from sociocultural competence. Further, Celce-Murcia (2007) separated actional competence into formulaic competence and interactional competence. Figure 2.1 is an attempt to visualize the discussion and evolution of the theory of communicative competence. Figure 2.1 is a combination of the Figures 2 and 3 in the article by Celce-Murcia et al. (1995) with the addition of the first two models and the final model. The first two models were added based on the chronological description in the Celce-Murcia et al. (1995) article. The connecting lines between the Bachman and Palmer (1996) and the Celce-Murcia (2007) models are drawn based on the