It was an interesting and a good learning experience reading about cultural competence. The first type addressed in the reading was grammatical competence. It is language competence with regards to sentence structure, syntax, and vocabulary usage. With regards to Korean, if I know how to write words in Hangul and know the subject-verb placement in a sentence, that means I have attained some level of grammatical competence.
The next type was discourse competence which deals with the ability to connect sentences to express a tangible meaning as a whole. With discourse competence in Korean I would be able to have at least a basic conversation with a proficient Korean speaker.
The third type is sociolinguistic competence. It involves understanding the social context of language usage. This competence is essential especially while communicating with a native speaker. Sociolinguistic aspects connect a language to culture and show that it is more than just an abstract structural method of communication. For example, how I interact with someone in Korean depends on the age and social standing of that person.
The fourth and the last type is strategic competence which is the ability to communicate despite having insufficient competence in the other three types. If I had to speak with a Korean speaker but did not have enough competency in the other types to put my message across, I could try to make them understand by using hand gestures. These competencies allow a speaker to perform the seven functions of a language given by Halliday.
Comments