SLA FINAL

• Communicative competence


  Coined by sociolinguist Dell Hymes (1972), who asserted that Chomsky's (1965) notion of competence was too limited
• Components of communicative competence

  • Grammatical competence
  • Discourse competence
  • Sociolinguistic competence
  • Strategic competence
• BICS


  Interpersonal language used for friendly exchanges in informal settings, involves slang and conversational metaphor, context-embedded communication
• CALP


  Specialized language used for educational tasks and activities, involves a conscious focus on language forms, context-reduced communication
• Canale and Swain's framework

  • Grammatical competence: Knowledge of lexical items and rules of morphology, syntax, sentence-grammar semantics, and phonology
  • Discourse competence: Ability to connect sentences in stretches of discourse and form a meaningful whole
  • Sociolinguistic competence: Ability to follow sociocultural rules of language
  • Strategic competence: Ability to use verbal and nonverbal techniques to compensate for communication breakdowns or insufficient competence
• Bachman's model of communicative competence


  • Illocutionary competence: Ability to manipulate the functions of language
  • Functions: Purposes accomplished with language (stating, requesting, responding, greeting, etc.)
  • Forms: Outward manifestation of language, while functions are the realization of those forms
• Locutionary meaning


  Basic literal or propositional meaning of an utterance or text
• Illocutionary force


  Intended effect that an utterance or text has on the hearer or reader
• Perlocutionary force


  Actual effect the utterance has on the hearer, including the consequences of the delivered message
• Halliday's seven functions of language

  • Instrumental
  • Regulatory
  • Representational
  • Interactional
  • Personal
  • Heuristic
  • Imaginative
• Functional approaches to language teaching

  • Focus on language functions, organize curricula around language functions, grammar is secondary, facilitate learning language forms for specific functions
• Interactional competence


  Ability to engage in social interaction, includes identifying participants and accounting for the context of interaction, involves understanding factors like gender, social class, and familiarity
• Register


  Style factors in the context of interaction
• Discourse analysis


  Study of language beyond individual sentences, examines the interrelation between form and function in communication, involves cohesive stretches of language in interactive exchanges
• Pragmatics


  Study of how context affects meaning in language, involves interpreting ambiguous sentences based on the situation
• Sociopragmatics


  Interface between pragmatics and social organization
• Pragmalinguistics


  Intersection of pragmatics and linguistic forms
• Acquiring sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic features in second language acquisition is difficult, and intercultural factors contribute to this difficulty
• Grammatical knowledge is fundamental to learning pragmalinguistic features in a second language
• Language and gender


  • Women tend to use language that expresses more uncertainty and politeness, while men are more likely to interrupt and use stronger expletives
  • Language and gender patterns vary across different languages and cultures
  • Sexist language that calls unnecessary attention to gender is discouraged
  • Research on language and gender has evolved to acknowledge the socially constructed nature of language
• Corpus analysis


  Branch of discourse analysis that utilizes computer analyses of language, allows for the identification of word frequencies and co-occurrences, focuses on naturally occurring language
• Research on communicative competence has focused primarily on verbal language, while nonverbal communication is difficult to quantify and observe objectively
• Understanding nonverbal communication is important for cross-cultural communication
• Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)

  • Approach to language pedagogy that focuses on the communicative nature of language classes, emphasizes the use of language for meaningful purposes, prioritizes fluency and accuracy in language use, encourages students to use the language in unrehearsed contexts
• Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT)


  • Major focus of language teaching practice worldwide, emphasizes classroom interaction, learner-centered teaching, and authenticity, uses tasks that have meaning, a problem to solve, and a real-world connection, distinguishes between target tasks and pedagogical tasks, considers task complexity and suggests sequencing tasks based on parameters