used in descriptive language report

1. THE ROLE OF GRAMMAR IN
MODELS OF COMMUNICATIVE
LANGAUGE ABILITY
ROSCEL
G.
JARDIN

2.  From the results of these assessments, we can then make
inferences about the students’ grammatical ability, which
would subsequently
provide an empirical basis for decision-making.
 Language assessment is clearly an integral part of
language teaching and learning, as it provides an
empirical basis for making a variety of educational
decisions, both on practical and theoretical levels.
 It is crucial that the assessments we use to measure
grammatical ability reflect the best practices available in
the field; otherwise, the inferences we make from
assessment scores may be neither meaningful nor
appropriate, and potentially unfair.

3. OBJECTIVES:
 It will discuss the role that grammar plays in models
of
communicative competence.
 It will then endeavour to define grammar for
assessment purposes.
 It will describe in some detail the relationships among
grammatical form, grammatical meaning and
pragmatic meaning.
 It will present a theoretical model of grammar that
will be used in this book as a basis for a model of
grammatical knowledge.

4. The role of grammar in models of
communicative competence:
What exactly does a
student need to “know” in terms of
grammar to be able to use it well
enough for some real-world purpose?’

5. How has grammatical
knowledge
been conceptualized
and defined in the
major models of
communicative competence
over the last few decades?

6. Lado (1961), having been influenced by
structuralist theory, proposed a ‘skills-and-
elements’ model of language proficiency
that viewed language ability as three more or
less independent, yet related, dimensions of
language knowledge, interpreted rather
narrowly
as phonology, structure and the lexicon – all
aspects of linguistic form.

7. Grammatical knowledge for Lado consisted
solely of morphosyntacticform.
Lado’s model is presented in Figure 3.1.
Phonology Structure Lexicon
Listening
Reading
Speaking
Writing

8. Carroll (1961) challenged the discrete-
point approach to measuring one point of
grammar at a time, as seen in Lado’s
(1961) skills and-elements model, and
proposed that discrete-point tasks be
complemented by integrative tasks that
would also assess the learner’s capacity to
use several components of language at the
same time.

9. Oller (1979) rejected the elements-and-skills approach
to proficiency, proposing instead a view of second or
foreign language proficiency in terms of an individual’s
‘pragmatic expectancy grammar’. He defined pragmatic
expectancy grammar as a psychologically real system
that ‘causes the learner to process sequences of elements
in a language that conform to the normal contextual
constraints of that language, and . . . requires the learner
to relate sequences of linguistic elements via pragmatic
mappings
to the extralinguistic context’ (Oller, 1979, p. 38).

10. Pragmatic expectancy grammar, consider the gap-
filling task.
In this task, the test-taker reads a passage with
periodic
gaps in the text. Reading the passage introduces the
test-taker to the context of the passage, allowing
him or her to relate the information to
‘extralinguistic context’ and to interpret it
accordingly. This provides a basis for the test-taker
to predict information for the gap, invoking the
notion of ‘expectancy’. The type of information the
test-taker might be expected to supply could relate
to linguistic form, semantic meaning and/or
pragmatic use, or could, in some way, tap into the
test-taker’s rhetorical, sociocultural or topical
knowledge.

11. Oller’s (1979) notion of pragmatic expectancy grammar
suggested a radically different and more complex
definition of what was generally understood by
grammatical knowledge, he did not identify or
clearly define the distinct components of expectancy
grammar. Nor did he clearly specify how these
components might be measured separately
or how they might relate to a coherent model of language
proficiency. On the contrary, Oller hypothesized that
pragmatic expectancy constituted a
single, unitary ability.

12. Subsequent research in language testing
(Bachman and Palmer, 1982)
clearly demonstrated, however, that this
hypothesis was not supported by research data
and that language ability was, indeed, multi-
componential. As a result, research on pragmatic
expectancy grammar was, unfortunately, short-
lived.

13. Canale and Swain. Inspired by the theoretical descriptions of
language in use proposed by Hymes (1971, 1972), they
argued that Chomsky’s (1965) notion of competence had
failed to account for sociolinguistic appropriateness
expressed by an utterance in context. They maintained that
this failing had serious implications since an utterance might
be grammatically correct, but sociolinguistically in
appropriate. As a result, Canale and Swain (1980) and later
Canale (1983) proposed a model of communicative
competence consisting of grammatical competence,
sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence and
strategic competence. This model has significantly broadened
our understanding of communicative competence by
specifying
features of linguistic form alongside other features of
language use.

14. Canale and Swain (1980) defined grammatical competence as
knowledge of the rules of phonology, the lexicon, syntax and
semantics. Grammatical competence embodied the lexico-
grammatical
or semantico-grammatical features of the language.
Canale and Swain acknowledged that both form and meaning
constituted interrelated features of grammatical competence,
they failed
to distinguish how the two were associated. Similarly, they
failed to articulate the relationship between grammatical
competence and the other competencies in their framework.
No explanation was provided on how their framework
accounted for cases in which grammar was used to encode
meanings beyond the sentence level or meanings that were
implied without being said when put to the
test of validation, Canale and Swain’s (1980) model was only
partially supported by research data (e.g., Harley, Allen,
Cummins and Swain, 1990).

15. Bachman and Palmer (1996)
proposed a multi-componential model
of communicative language ability which has provided
the most comprehensive conceptualization of language
ability to date.
This model views language ability as an internal
construct, consisting of language knowledge and strategic
competence, that interacts with the language user’s
topical knowledge and other internal characteristics
(affect), as well as with the characteristics of the context.
Language use thus consists of internal interactions among
learner attributes ( language knowledge, strategic
competence, topical knowledge, affect)
together with external interactions between these
attributes and features of the language-use context.

16. Bachman and Palmer (1996)
specified two general components:
(1) organizational knowledge or how individuals
control language structure to produce
grammatically correct utterances or sentences and
texts.
(2) pragmatic knowledge or how individuals
communicate meaning and how they produce
contextually appropriate utterances, sentences or
texts.

17. Organizational Knowledge
is further divided into grammatical
knowledge, or ‘how individual
utterances or sentences are
organized’, and textual knowledge,
or ‘how utterances or sentences are
organized into texts’

18. Grammatical knowledge
is defined as an individual’s
knowledge of vocabulary, syntax and
phonology/graphology.
Textual knowledge refers to an individual’s
knowledge of cohesion (e.g.,pronouns, lexical
repetition), rhetorical organization (e.g., logical
connectors) and conversational organization (e.g.,
turn-taking strategies,
topic nomination).

19. Grammatical knowledge in this model
accounts for grammar on the subsentential
and sentential levels, while
Textual knowledge accounts for language on a
suprasentential or discourse level.

20. Pragmatic knowledge is then defined in terms of
functional knowledge and sociolinguistic knowledge.
Functional knowledge refers to ‘how
utterances or sentences and texts are related to the
communicative goals
of language users.
Functional knowledge enables
individuals to use organizational knowledge to express
or interpret language functions in communicative
settings.

21. Sociolinguistic knowledge
refers to ‘how utterances or sentences and texts are
related to features of the language use setting, it
enables individuals to understand situation-specific
language and to tailor language to a particular
language-use setting.