2. Noam Chomsky: An
American linguist, first
introduced the concept
of “performance” and
“competence” as part
of the foundations for
his Generative grammar.
3. Person’s knowledge of his
language.
• The system rules which a
language user has mastered
so that it would be possible
for that user to produce
and understand an infinite
number of sentences and
recognise grammatical
mistakes and ambiguities
COMPETENCE
PERFORMANCE
A term used in the
linguistic theory of
transformational
generative grammar,
refer to language is
seen as a set of
specific utterances
produced by native
speaker.
4.
5. How do we know that students have
learned a language?
We can assess students using formative and
summative assessments but
How do we know that students will
actually be able to use their language
in real-life, authentic situations?
In short,
How do we know that our students
are competent in the target
language?
One way to judge this competency is
through students’ performance. However,
How do we know that this
performance is an accurate measure
of what students actually know?
Questions
6. Chomsky separates competence and
performance; he describes 'competence' as
an idealized capacity that is located as a
psychological or mental property or function
and ‘performance’ as the production of
actual utterances.
7. In short, competence involves “knowing”
the language and performance involves
“doing” something with the language. The
difficulty with this construct is that it is very
difficult to assess competence without
assessing performance.
8. Noting the distinction between
competence and performance is
useful primarily because it
allows those studying a language
to differentiate between a
speech error and not knowing
something about the language.
To understand this distinction, it
is helpful to think about a time
when you've made some sort of
error in your speech.
9. For example, let's say you are a native
speaker of English and utter the following:
We swimmed in the ocean this weekend.
Is this error due to competence
or
performance?
10. It is most likely that as a native speaker you are
aware how to conjugate irregular verbs in the
past but your performance has let you down
this time. Linguists use the distinction
between competence and performance to
illustrate the intuitive difference between
accidentally saying swimmed and the fact that
a child or non-proficient
speaker of English may
not know that the past tense
of swim is swam and say
swimmed consistently.
11. As we have learned, competence
and performance involve
“knowing” and “doing”. In the
recent past, many language
instruction programs have focused
more on the “knowing”
(competence) part of learning a
language where in words and
sentences are presented and
practiced in a way to best help
learners internalize the forms.
12. The assumption here is that
once the learners have
‘learned’ the information they
will be able to use it through
reading, writing, listening and
speaking. The disadvantage of
this approach is that the
learners are unable to use the
language in a natural way.
13. Having been trained to learn
the language through
“knowing”, learners have
difficulty reversing this training
and actually “doing” something
with the language. In brief, it
is difficult to assess whether
the learners’ insufficient
proficiency is due to limitations
of competency or a lack of
performance.
14. In order to focus learners more
on the “doing” part of learning,
which allows a more accurate
measure of learners’ language
proficiency, a more
communicative approach to
teaching can be used. This
type of approach concentrates
on getting learners to do things
with the language.
15. Some teachers might understand, for instance, the
nature of some mistakes in terms of interference
from the L1. Others might interpret mistakes as the
lack of cultural and social knowledge of the target
language. In any case, the important point is that
teachers might be able to understand better the
nature of the learning process and apply certain
orientations towards the syllabus design and
classroom activities (Bell, 1981). Besides, a language
teacher who understands and distinguishes
competence from performance necessarily has a
different vision of the students difficulties when
learning the L2 and, as so, conceives the learners
roles differently, e.g. not as a passive learner, but as
an active member of the teaching-learning process
(Nunan, 1991; Nunan, 1999).
16. 1) Contextualized activities: one of the
problems that may be faced by students
is that out-of-context activities might
frustrate the development of linguistic
and communicative L2 competences. It
is, therefore, of paramount importance
to promote authentic activities that
encourage students to see language
as it actually works.
17. 2) Interactive
activities: interaction is
considered to be a key factor in
the L2 classroom. Interaction of
the sort student-teacher-
student is of paramount
importance to the development
of the linguistic and
communicative competences of
students. However, such
interactivity must be
contextualized in actual
language use situations so that
students understand the real
purposes of language.
18. 3) Professor’s Feedback: it is relevant to
consider the effects of teachers’
feedback in the development of the
linguistic and communicative
competences in the L2 classroom setting.
However, a question arises in terms of
the effectiveness of correcting mistakes
explicitly. In this sense, it is better that
teachers explore the learning strategies
of each student and try to determine
what they need. In any case, it is
important to foster activities that involve
students in cognitive processes that allow
them to solve linguistic problems related
to competence. At the end, they might
not need explicit grammar instruction to
learn the L2.
19. 4) Contextual factors: it is important
to account for contextual factors that
are present in the teaching and
learning process, i.e. the
environment, the L1 linguistic
competence, the authenticity of the
activities, the linguistic distance
between the L1 and the L2, among
others.
20. However this list is in no way (and it
does not attempt to be) the solution
for helping students in developing
such competences. However, the most
important issue here is to consider the
importance of terms such
as competence and performance in
real-life learning-teaching
environments and the L2 pedagogical
implications they acquaint for.
