This article really touched on some points that I have talked about in class (and in blog posts as well I believe) that I think are very important when speaking a language.
When it comes to speaking a language there are the hard skills such as grammar and vocabulary and there are the soft skills such as body language and intonation. The article talked about the importance of the soft skills when speaking because it highly changes the meaning of a phrase. The example they gave about saying, "I don't like this casserole" could be interpreted in many different ways (an insult, apology, sad, joking, etc.) and neither the grammar of vocabulary influence this.
Last year when I was at the French Food Festival in Richmond I sat down at a table with a family speaking french. They turned to me and spoke to me in french as if I were a native too. We chatted for a while and then they asked me when I moved to the US, I said I was born here. They they asked me how many years I lived in France for and I said only four months. They were all shocked, they thought I was a native because I spoke like a french person even though we only talked about simple things. This was mostly do to the soft skills I learned while living in France with a french family. The article talks about how a native speaker as a natural inclination to speak a certain way and I think it can be learned because it seems that I learned it last year.
Also I thought the diagrams in the article made a lot of sense; my pragmatic competence is definitely higher than my organizational competence and the skills they related to those two types of competence held true from my experience.
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