The reading, "Communicative Competence," offered some interesting and useful information.
Dell Hymes created the term communicative competence which is, "that aspect of our competence that enables us to convey and interpret messages and to negotiate meanings interpersonally within specific contexts" (219). For the sake of brevity, I will specifically focus on communicative competence since I believe it was the helpful part of the article that could directly apply to my learning of Persian. The definition of communicative competence has been interpreted by many over time, and tends to include several subcategories: grammatical competence, discourse competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence.
- Grammatical competence refers to the competence used to learn the linguistic code of a language (219)
- Discourse competence refers to a wide range of competences that includes our ability to speak and our interaction with written text (220)
- Sociolinguistic competence indicates an understanding of the social context of a language
- Strategic competence refers to an individual's ability to recover from mistakes they make when speaking the language, often due to a lack of fluent knowledge
I found learning about the different forms of competencies to be very useful tool in measuring my learning of Persian. The different competencies allow me to specifically address areas of improvement. For example, since I do not know Persian extremely well, trying to build my strategic competency will be very useful in conversations with fluent speakers who will more readily realize my mistakes.
The article also delved into a copious amount of information discussing the workings behind language and language learning. I never really took the time to understand the functions of language (i.e., the purpose behind each particular aspect of communication); however, reading about functions was interesting. It made me think of all the different ways we use language, and all of the different things we mean to convey without particularly taking notice of them. Learning about discourse analysis, which joins the form and function of a language, was also a means for me to better understand the logic and comprehension of a language. If I had to pick the greatest benefit from reading "Communicative Competence," it would be the knowledge I gained of learning how to example each particular logical aspect associated with language that could further apply to me further developing my ability to speak Farsi.
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