Communicative Competence and Rules of Speaking

in Perspectives: Sociolinguistics and TESOL
by Nessa Wolfson

Problems in analyzing sociolinguistic rules.

Most ethnographic have been conducted on homogenous, traditional societies. The US is more diverse so it is more challenging, but there are similarities. Many books do not clearly distinguish between language and culture. "Language is an aspect of culture" -Goodenough

Knowledge about sociolinguistic rules are below the level of consciousness and native speaker intuition about sociolinguistic rules are often wrong. Bloom and Gumperz (1972) found out that in a small Norwegian town, the locals thought they spoke their dialect mroe often than they really did. Labov found that speakers reported the form they were targeting instead of the form they actually spoke.

Brouwer et al. (1979) thought that Dutch people would have gendered forms of language--they did, but what form they used depended on the sex of the addressee, not the speaker. Intuition is just unreliable, but usually speakers don't believe this.

Godfrey 1980 analyzed advanced ELL tense-changing "errors"--however, these "errors" mirrored NES historical present tense.

Pica (1983) found that textbooks don't tecah the actual rules of articles a and the.

Communicative competence should be taught to ELLs, but this instruction should not be based on NS intuition.

After Hymes introduced the idea of communicative competence, it began to be misapplied in ESL classrooms. Some teachers interpreted grammatical competence as seperate from cc instead of an aspect of it.

Canale and Swain in 1980 clarified the idea of c.c. 3 components: grammatical, sociolinguistic, and strategic c. Sociolinguistic competence has 2 components: discourse and sociocultural.

TESOL looked to the field of sociolinguistics for answers, but there were none. Sociolinguistics had to begin by defining, What is a speech community? Within one language there can be many speech communities with different rules for speaking. Defining the rules for speaking in English is useless, if you do not define the particular speech community. Neustopny observed that people who speak different languages (like Czech and Hungarian) can hold similar speaking rules.

It becomes almost impossible to identify subgroups.