Developing Communicative Competence in a Second Language

Abstract

I This book is the first compilation of studies I have seen specifically oriented to the exploration of second language communicative competence and to its elaboration in terms of the framework developed by Canale and Swain (1980) and elaborated by Canale (1983). The Canale and Swain framework includes four competencies: grammatical competence, the understanding of vocabulary, pronunciation, and syntax; sociolinguistic competence, the knowledge of speech acts and the appropriate use of language; discourse competence, the ability to produce coherent and cohesive texts; and strategic competence, the ability to enhance communication or deal with breakdowns in it. The editors have chosen not to include a section on grammatical competence, an area which, they note, has already received a great deal of attention. They add sections on communicative competence in first language acquisition and in the workplace and on developing communicative competence in the language classroom. This book is useful for ESL teachers and researchers, and for courses in L2 acquisition and research design. The questions at the end of each section are mostly useful for testing the reader's comprehension of chapter contents although some address research design. One drawback is that the chapters are of unequal quality and only Scarcella's refers to other chapters. This leads to a curious lack of discussion about the usefulness of the Canale and Swain framework or about whether the new competencies included in this book have features which distinguish them from the original ones. In addition, the decision to illustrate Canale and Swain's much quoted framework with papers not written specifically for this volume poses a problem discussed only briefly in the introductionone chapter seems to describe both discourse and strategic competencies. This raises the question of whether there are in fact two separate competencies. In the section on first language acquisition, Anderson's Acquiring Conversation Competence: Knowledge of Register Variation addresses the pressing question of whether this competency is developmental in nature. She finds children first using prosody, then topic and the lexicon, and finally syntactic adjustments to indicate register. Although Anderson does not connect her work to nonnative speakers, we could conjecture that since these features are clearly salient in child language acquisition, ESL teachers may