Group 6 (Wildatun Nahdiah and Evi Eka Rahmawati)

Communicative Competence

            Hymes referred to Communicative Competence as the aspect of our competence that enables us to convey and interpret messages and to negotiate meanings interpersonally within specific contexts. In similar vein, James Cummins (1980, 1979) proposed a distinction between cognitive/academic language proficiency (CALP) and basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS). CALP is that dimension of proficiency in which the learner manipulates or reflects upon the surface features of language outside of the immediate interpersonal context. On the other hand, BICS is the communicative capacity that all children acquire in order to be able to function in daily interpersonal exchanges.

            In Canale and Swain’s and later in Canale’s (1983) definition, four different components, or subcategories, made up the construct of Communicative Competence. The first two subcategories reflected the use of the linguistic system itself; the last two defined the functional aspects of communication, the first is Grammatical Competence (is that aspect of Communicative Competence that encompasses “knowledge of lexical’ items and of rules of morphology, syntax, sentence-grammar semantics, and phonology.). The second subcategory is Discourse Competence (It is ability we have to connect sentences in stretches of discourse and to form a meaningful whole out of series of utterances.). The third is Sociolinguistic Competence (is the knowledge of the sociocultural rules of language and of discourse.), and the fourth subcategory is Strategic Competence (Canale and Swain (1980, p. 30) described strategic competence as “the verbal and nonverbal communication strategies that may be called into action to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to performance variables to due insufficient competence.).

Language Function

Functions are essentially the purposes that we accomplish with language, e.g., stating, requesting, responding, greeting, parting, etc. Function cannot be accomplished, of course, without the forms of language; morphemes, words, grammar rules, discourse rules, and the other organizational competencies. While forms are the outward manifestation of language, functions are the realization of those forms.