3 Rethinking the Role of Communicative Competence

Abstract

In the mid-1990s I had many discussions with colleagues concerning the role of ‘communicative competence’ in language teaching and applied linguistics. These discussions resulted in two publications (Celce-Murcia et al. 1995; Celce-Murcia 1995). Then during the late 1990s I co-authored a text on the role of discourse and context in language teaching (CelceMurcia and Olshtain 2000), which further influenced my thinking about the role of communicative competence in language teaching. In this paper I present a revised and updated model of communicative competence which synthesizes and elaborates on my previous work and which further explores the role that this model of communicative competence could play in language teaching. The term ‘communicative competence’ has been in circulation for about forty years and has been used extensively in justifications and explications of communicative language teaching. Thus before I discuss my revised model in some detail, I would like to summarize briefly the evolution of the term ‘communicative competence’ starting with its original source (Hymes 1967, 1972) through the contributions of Canale and Swain (1980), Canale (1983), and Celce-Murcia et al. (1995). There have been other models proposed to represent constructs similar to ‘communicative competence’ (e.g., the ‘language ability’ in Bachman (1990); Bachman and Palmer (1996); however, these models have been developed with language assessment in mind—rather than language teaching. For most discussions of language pedagogy per se, the model proposed by Canale and Swain (l980), along with the elaborations proposed by Canale (l983), remain the key sources for discussions of communicative competence and related applications in applied linguistics and language pedagogy. in Language Teaching

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