This document discusses communicative language ability and its components. It defines communicative language ability as including both language competence and strategic competence. Language competence involves grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, and discourse competence. Strategic competence allows people to use the knowledge of language competence to communicate effectively in real-world contexts. It discusses models of communicative language ability and describes the various components in more detail.

1. Communicative Language Ability
Lyle F . Bachman
A presentation by:
Zeynab Khalafi

2. Communicative Language Ability
• Communicative language ability includes the
competence of language and the capacity for
implementing this competence.
• the ability to use language ability to use language
communicatively involves both knowledge of or
competence in the language and the capacity for
implementing , or using this competence.
(widdowson1983,candlin1986).

3. Language Proficiency and Communicative
Competence
• Early Models (Lado): distinguish skills (reading, speaking)
from components of knowledge (grammar, vocabulary)
• Later Models
• Halliday (1976): language functions
• VanDijk (1977): delineation of the relationship between text
and context.
• Hymes (1972): recognize the sociocultural factors in the
speech situation
• Recognition of the dynamic interaction between the context
and the discourse.

4. Framework of Communicative Language Ability
(CLA)
• Communicative language ability (CLA) can be
described as consisting of both knowledge, or
competence and the capacity for implementing, or
executing that competence in appropriate
,contextualized communicative language use.(candlin
1986).

5. Framework of Communicative Language
Ability (CLA)
• Three components:
• Language competence: specific knowledge of
components used in communication
• Strategic competence: mental capacity for implementing
the components of language competence in contextualized
communicative language use. (real-word knowledge,
sociocultural knowledge).
• Psychophysiological mechanisms: neurological and
psychological process in the actual execution of
language as a physical phenomenon.(sound,light)

6. Framework of Communicative Language
Ability (CLA)

7. Framework of Communicative Language
Ability (CLA)
• Attempts to prove the validity of the components
have not been successful.
• Allen (1983) tried to measure grammatical
competence (morphology and syntax) , discourse
competence (cohesion and coherence) and
sociolinguistic competence (sensitivity to register),
failed to support the factorial distinctness of these
particular components.

8. Framework of Communicative Language
Ability
• Bachman(1982): grammatical and pragmatically competence
are closely associated with each other, while sociolinguistic
competence are distinct.

9. Framework of Communicative Language
Ability (CLA)

10. Language Competence
• Language competence: grammatical,
sociolinguistic, and discourse competence
(Canale & Swain):
– organizational competence
» grammatical competence
» textual competence
– pragmatic competence
» illocutionary competence
» sociolinguistic competence

11. Language Competence
The organizational competence is divided into
grammatical competence and textual
competence.

12. Language Competence
• Grammatical Competence:
Knowledge of vocabulary, morphology, syntax,
phonology and graphology.
These competences govern the choice of words to
express specific significations, their forms, their
arrangement in utterances to express propositions,
and their physical realizations as described by
widdowson(1987).

13. Language Competence
The textual competence, pertains to the knowledge of
conventions for cohesion and coherenceand
rehetorical organization. It also includes conventions
for language use in conversations, involving starting,
maintaining, and closing conversations.
Bachman’s textual competence have both the part of
Canale and Swain’s discourse competence and
the part of their strategies.

14. Language Competence
• textual competence is Knowledge of the conventions for
joining utterances together to form a text
• Convention (Halliday): semantic relationships such as
references, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical
cohesion.
• Convention (Grice): given and new information
• Conventions Of rhetorical organization: narration, description,
comparison, classification, process analysis.
• Conventions of conversational language: establishing,
maintaining, terminating conversations, attention getting, topic
nomination, topic development and conversation maintenance.

15. pragmatic Competence
• Pragmatic competence: is the relationships between
the language users and the context of communication,
utterance and the acts or functions that speakers
intend to perform through these utterances.
• Van Dijk’s aspects of pragmatics:

16. pragmatic Competence
• The examination of the pragmatic conditions that
whether or not a given utterance is acceptable to other
users of the language as an act, or the performance of
an intended function
• The characterization of the conditions that determine
which utterances are successful in which situations.

17. Language Competence
• Pragmatic Competence:
Bachman’s pragmatic competence, mainly focuses on
the relationship between what one says in his or her
communicative acts and what functions he or she
intends to perform through his or her utterances.
• illocutionary competence: (ideational, manipulative,
heuristic,& imaginativefunctions; coherence;
speech acts).

18. Language Functions of Illocutionary
Competence
• Manipulative function: the primary purpose is to affect the
world around us. this function is performed in formulating and
stating rules, laws and norms of behavior.
• we have two functions according to manipulative:
• 1- regulatory : is used to control the behavior of others.
• 2- interactional : is used to form, maintain, or change
interpersonal relationships. Any act of interpersonal language
use involves two levels of message:
a) context b) relationship

19. Language Functions of Illocutionary
Competence
• Ideational function: we express meaning in terms of
our experience of the real world.
• Heuristic function: extend our knowledge of the
world around us.
• Imaginative function: create or extend our own
environment for humorous or esthetic purposes,
where the value derives from the way in which the
language itself is used.

20. Sociolinguistic Competence
• sociolinguistic component is the sensitivity to, or
control of the convections of language use that are
determined by the features of the specific language
use context ; it enables us to perform language
functions in ways that are appropriate to that context.
• Here are 4 abilities under sociolinguistic competence

21. Language Competence
1. Sensitivity to differences in dialect or variety : in
every language there are variations in use that may
be associated with different geographic regions or
different social groups. These can be characterized
by different conventions and the appropriateness of
their use will vary, depending on the features of the
language use context.

22. Sociolinguistic competence
2.Sensitivity to differences in register : register refer to
variation in language use within a single dialect or
variety. We distinguish differences in register in
terms of 3 aspects of the language use context : 1)
field of discourse. 2) mode of discourse 3) style of
discourse.

23. Language Competence
3.Sensitivity to naturalness: It allows the user to either formulate
or interpret an utterance which is not only linguistically
accurate, but which is also phrased in what researchers called
a native like way.
4.Ability to interpret cultural references and figures of speech : It
allows to use and interpret cultural references and figures of
speech. Knowledge of the extended meaning given by a
specific culture to particular events, places, institutions or
people is required are referred to in language use.

24. Language Competence
• textual competence is Knowledge of the conventions for
joining utterances together to form a text
• Convention (Halliday): semantic relationships such as
references, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical
cohesion.
• Convention (Grice): given and new information
• Conventions Of rhetorical organization: narration, description,
comparison, classification, process analysis.
• Conventions of conversational language: establishing,
maintaining, terminating conversations, attention getting, topic
nomination, topic development and conversation maintenance.

25. Sociolinguistic Competence
• Appropriateness of these functions and their varieties
in language use context
• Sensitivity to differences in dialect or variety
• Sensitivity to differences in register
• Sensitivity to naturalness
• Ability to interpret cultural references and figures of
speech.

26. Strategic Competence
• Interactional definition (Tarone: 1981): the mutual
attempt by two interlocutors to agree on a meaning in
situations where the requisite meaning structures do
not seem to be shared. Problem: some communicative
language use involves only one individual.
• Canale and Swain (1980): the definition of strategic
competence includes both the compensatory
characteristic and enhancement characteristic.

27. Psycholinguistic Description of Strategies
• Faerch and Kasper (1983): speech production
includes a planning phase and an execution phase.
• Planning phrase: communicative goals and planning
process

28. Psycholinguistic Description of Strategies
• Communicative goals: an actional element associated with
speech acts, an modal element associated with the role
relationship and a prepositional element associated with the
content of the communicative event.
• Planning process: interaction of three components—the
communicative goal, the communicative resources and the
assessment of the communicative situation.
• Execution phase: neurological and physiological
processes of implementation of the plan.

29. Bachman’s strategic competence
• Assessment component
• Planning component
• Execution component

30. Assessment Component
Enables us to:
• Identify the information
• Determine what language competencies are at our
disposal.
• Ascertain the abilities and knowledge that are shared
by our interlocutors.
• Following the communication attempt, evaluate the
extent to which the communicative goal has been
achieved.

31. Planning Component
• The planning component retrieves relevant items
from language competence and formulates a plan
whose realization is expected to achieve the
communicative goal.

32. Execution Component
• The execution component draws on the relevant
psychophysiciological mechanisms to implement the
plan in the modality and channel appropriate to the
communicative goal and the context.

34. The influence of strategic competence on
language test performance
• It wants to extent to which strategic competence affect
scores on language test. Some types of test tasks
may measure strategic competence almost by design.
• The type of scanning used can also be expected to
influence the effect of starting competence on test
performance . If a test is scored solely on the basis of
the practical effect of the language performance, the
potential contribution of strategic competence may be
high.

35. Can we measure strategic competence?
• Intelligence is distinct from language abilities. It
may be inaccurate to identify strategic
competence with intelligence . At the same time,
to simply dismiss strategic competence as a
general ability whose effects on language test
performance we can't measure is to beg the
question.

36. Psychosiological mechanisms
• In order to fully characterize language use, it is
necessary to consider the psychophysiological
mechanisms that are involved in language use. These
are essentially the neurological and physiological
processes that include the execution phase language use
. thus we can distinguish the visual from the auditory
channel and the productive from the receptive mode.
• That are shared by our interlocutor following the
communication attempt , evaluate the extent to which
the communicative goal has been achieved.