first language acquisiition and competence

1. Competence and
Performance
By:
Sahil Gupta
Parteek Singla

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History
O Ferdinand de Saussure: A Swiss linguist whose ideas
on structure in language laid the foundation of the 20th
century linguistics. He used the terminology: “la
langue” and “parole”.
O Noam Chomsky: An American linguist, first introduced
the concept of “performance” and “competence” as
part of the foundations for his Generative grammar.

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de Saussure’s Theory
La Langue
O It has a large number of elements whereby meaning is
created by the arrangements between the elements
and their consequent relationships.
O While learning a language, we master the system of
grammar, spelling, syntax and punctuation (elements
of langue).
O Langue precedes and makes speech possible.
Parole
O Parole is the actual utterances. It is an external
manifestation of langue. It is the usage of the system,
but not the system.

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O His theory differentiates between the language and
how it is used, and therefore enables these two very
different things to be studied as separate entities.
O Saussure was interested more in la langue than parole.
It was the system by which meaning could be created
that was of interest to him rather than individual
instances of its use.

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Chomsky’s Theory
O Chomsky also distinguished the underlying knowledge
of language from the way language is actually used in
practice.
O According to him, Language performance may be
affected by such things as attention, stamina, memory,
etc.
O Therefore, a theory of language should be a theory of
competence. Once a full theory of competence is
developed, it can be integrated into a theory of
performance, which will also consider other cognitive
abilities.

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Competence
O Competence is a person’s underlying (subconscious)
linguistic ability to create and understand sentences,
including sentences they have never heard before.
O It’s a person's acquaintance with a set of grammatical
rules and is different from the actual linguistic activities.
O Linguistic competence includes components such as
phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics and
morphology.

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O Competence enables native speaker to recognize
ambiguous sentences or accept even apparently
meaningless sentences as syntactically correct (and
even making some sense).
O Even if you’ve never heard these before, you know
which one is “English” and which one isn’t.
Example:
Eight very lazy elephants drank brandy.
*Eight elephants very lazy brandy drank.

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Performance
O Performance is the real world linguistic output.
O May accurately reflect competence, but it also may
include speech errors.
O Performance may be flawed because of memory
limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and
interest, and errors (random or characteristic) or other
psychological factors.
O Represents only a small sample of possible utterances.

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Performance error
OThe performance of a speaker may not be fault
free, even though his competence is perfect.
Example :
OLearning and riding a bike.

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Why is it important to make a
distinction between competence and
performance?
O 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.

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O For example, let's say you are a native speaker of English
and utter the following:
“We swimmed in the ocean this weekend.”
O Is this error due to competence or performance?
O It isn't that you don't know that the past tense of swim is
swam, you've just mistakenly applied the regular rule to an
irregular verb.
O Distinction between competence and performance
illustrates the 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.
O Your competence is fine, it is your performance that has
let you down.

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Competence versus
performance
O Competence, being an ideal, is located as a
psychological or mental property. This is in contrast to
performance, which refers to an actual event.
O Chomsky argues that only under an idealized situation
whereby the speaker-hearer is unaffected by
grammatically irrelevant conditions such as memory
limitations and distractions will performance be a
direct reflection of competence.

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Distinction between the theories
O Whereas the terms ‘performance’ (Chomsky) and
‘parole’ (de Saussure) can be used almost
interchangeably, their counterparts ‘competence’ and
‘langue’ are quite different from each other.
O ‘Langue’ is a static system of signs, whereas
‘competence’ is understood as a dynamic concept, as
a mechanism that will generate language endlessly.
O Chomsky’s theory is more psychological.

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How do competence and
performance apply to the language
classroom?
O The assumption used in many language instruction
programs is that once the learners have ‘learned’ the
information they will be able to use it through reading,
writing, listening and speaking.
O The disadvantage of this approach is that having been
trained to learn the language through
“knowing”(competence), learners have difficulty
actually “doing”(performance) something with the
language.

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Criticisms
O Linguistic theories based on the notion of competence
have been criticized for being too idealistic.
O However, Chomsky dismissed criticisms of delimiting
the study of performance in favor of the study of
underlying competence, as unwarranted and
completely misdirected.
O This led to a broadening of the original concept to
communicative competence, introduced by Hymes
(1974). This is now generally defined as “the socially
appropriate use of language”.

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Thank You!
Questions?