Abstract
Linguistic competence, communicative competence, and interactional competence have had a profound impact on second language teaching, learning, and testing. Although a substantial number of studies have been conducted on these three competencies, they have not been conflated for discussion in a single study. Adding this piece to the jigsaw, the current paper explores these three competencies in depth. This paper had a twin purpose of 1) providing a historical account of the linguistic, communicative and interactional competences, and 2) reviewing of the literature on them in order to identify gaps, if any, with the intention to propose new research ideas pertaining to the three types of competences. In order to achieve the study aims, an intensive literature survey was conducted. Based on the review of the related research on linguistic, communicative and interactional competencies, this article offers recommendations for effective classroom practice and future research.
Highlights
Three types of competences, namely linguistic competence, communicative competence and interactional competence, have had significant influence on second language teaching, learning and testing research and practice (Thornbury 2006; Young 2011)
The theory of linguistic competence was proposed by Noam Chomsky, one of the most prominent linguists of the 20th century, and his theory revolutionized the arena of theoretical linguistics (Barman 2014)
Noam Chomsky revolutionized the linguistic world with his theory of linguistic competence, Hymes criticized Chomsky’s theory arguing grammatical knowledge was not sufficient for effective communication, and introduced communicative competence
Summary
Namely linguistic competence, communicative competence and interactional competence, have had significant influence on second language teaching, learning and testing research and practice (Thornbury 2006; Young 2011). Competence refers to the native speakers’ (ideal speaker-listeners’) knowledge of the linguistic system (grammar) of their language (Canale & Swain 1980), while performance is seen as the actual language use (Chomsky 2006). He asserts that a number of different factors need to be taken into account in order to study the real language performance. Their instructional decisions are influenced by their beliefs and by certain factors such as time
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