Unit 4

Question 1

What is the notion of competence?

Answer 1

Abstraction in language theory which refers to an ideal speaker’s innate ability to generate and understand utterances.

Question 2

What is the basic hypothesis of Noam Chomsky’s Generative Transformational Grammar?

Answer 2

Linguistic competence (and competence v. performance)

Question 3

The phrase communicative competence, as opposed to Chomsky’s linguistic competence, was first introduced by whom?

Answer 3

By Dell Hymes in the late 1960s as a reflection on knowledge and language use.

Students needed to know not only what was grammatically correct, but what was communicatively appropriate in any given context.

Question 4

Components of communicative competence according to Canale and Swain (1980)

Answer 4

• Grammatical competence
• Sociolinguistic competence (sociocultural rules and rules of discourse).
• Discourse competence (combining grammatical forms and meanings for different registers and genres).
• Strategic competence (verbal and nonverbal strategies to compensate for breakdowns in communication)