New Journal Entry #10

[Mark Kligman]

The reading, "Communicative Competence," offered some useful insight.The term communicative competence is defined by Dell Hymes as: "that aspect of our competence that enables us to convey and interpret messages and to negotiate meanings interpersonally within specific contexts". I believe that out of the different competences, communicative competence was the most the most interesting and applicable term for my own learning of Turkish. The definition of communicative competence includes several subcategories such as: grammatical competence, discourse competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence. Grammatical competence refers to the competence used to learn the linguistic code of a language, discourse competence refers to a wide range of competences that includes our ability to speak and our interaction with written text, sociolinguistic competence indicates an understanding of the social context of a language, and 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 Turkish. The different competencies have shown me what areas of improvement I need to focus on. For instance, since I am a beginning learner in Turkish, building my strategic competency will come in handy throughout conversations with experienced speakers who will notice my shortcomings in speaking the language and provide help with fixing my mistakes to become a better speaker. I believe my greatest benefit from reading "Communicative Competence," was the knowledge I gained from learning how to make an example out of particular logical aspects that are associated with language and could be applied to my further learning and advancement in capability of speaking Turkish.