The Role of Communicative Competence in
L2 Learning

Masashito Kamiya
Introduction
It has been well over three decades since communicative
approach to language teaching first appeared in print in thefield of second language acquisition (SLA). In various types oflanguage institutions in Japan, including universities and colleges,
language teachers and curriculum researchers have implemented
communication-oriented teaching syllabi to seek for more effective
ways for improving students’ communication skills to replace the traditional, grammar-oriented approach of the past. To some Japaneseteachers of English, however, a Communicative Language Teaching(CLT) approach is challenging to adopt in their classroom, for thecurrent model of communicative competence, which is viewed as thebasis of CLT, has been developed on native-speaker norms that are
different socioculturally and educationally from those of the Japanese (Komiya, Samimy, and Kobayashi, 2004; Wolfson, 1983) andthat there has been much confusion regarding what CLT actuallyrequires teachers to do in their communicatively functional syllabus(Brown, 1994b). There is no doubt, however, that, in learning an L2,
it is necessary for students to acquire, in addition to phonologicaland lexico-grammatical knowledge, ways to communicate with others
using their target language. The problem is how. In this paper, I will,
ﬁrst, look at how the notion of communicative competence has cometo play an important role in the fields of sociolinguistics and SLA

Ȗ¡¡63¡¡Ȗover the years. Then, I will discuss how communicative competence
should be incorporated into L2 teaching at the college level in Japan.

Chomsky’s Perspective on Competence
ɉThe conception of communicative competence came about inreaction to the following assertion made by generative-grammarian
Norm Chomsky»
Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal
speaker - listener, in a completely homogeneous speech community, who knows its language perfectly and is unaffected by such grammatically irrelevant conditions as memory
limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, anderrors (random or characteristic) in applying his knowledge ofthe language in actual performance. (Chomsky, 1965: 3)
Chomsky clearly distinguished the description of language form
(competence) and language use (performance) and established thatthe speaker - listener’s internal grammar that judges the gram maticality of sentences should be the main object of investigation for
linguists.

Perspectives from SociolinguisticsÄðîîöïêäâõê÷æ¡Äðîñæõæïäæ: ¡Éúîæô
It was not long before Chomsky’s notion of idealized linguisticcompetence came under attack. Dell Hymes, a sociolinguist as wellas ethnographer of communication, was the first, among many
distinguished language scholars, to introduce the idea of communicative competence in terms of the “appropriateness of sociocultural sig-Ȗ¡¡64¡¡Ȗniﬁcance of an utterance” (Canale and Swain, 1980). Hymes (1974),
retaining the idea of Chomsky’s underlying grammatical competence,
looks at contextual relevance as one of the crucial aspects of one’s
knowledge of language and claims that meaning in communication
is determined by its speech community and actual communicative
event in question, which consists of the following components hecalls SPEAKING (a mnemonic code word): Setting, Participants,
Ends, Act sequence, Key, Instrumentalities, Norms of interaction
and interpretation, and Genre (see Hymes, 1974; Coulthard, 1985;
Jaworski and Coupland, 1999 ; Kramsch, 1993 ; and Wardhaugh,
1998, for detailed descriptions of SPEAKING). These are broadly
considered speech contexts in which real verbal interaction takes
place. For a person to say he or she knows a language, therefore, heor she must know “when to speak, when not, ... what to talk about
with whom, when, where, in what manner” (Hymes, 1972: 277), in
addition to how to make a sentence grammatical. In other words, hemaintains that the knowledge of language that Chomsky associatedwith competence should be taken more comprehensively to include
knowledge about the above-mentioned components, namely the rulesof language use.
Furthermore, in addition to the knowledge of appropriatenessa speaker is presumed to have in using his or her language, Hymes
brings into discussion the issue of occurrence (whether and to what
extent something is done) and feasibility (whether and to what
extent something is possible under any given circumstance), whichmakes not only one’s knowledge but also expectation part of his or
her competence (Duranti, 1988; Hymes, 1972; Saville-Troike 1989,
1996). This more elaborated concept of communicative competence
has broadened the deﬁnition and treatment of language competenceȖ¡¡65¡¡Ȗfor linguistic inquiry.

Õéæ¡Æõéïðèóâñéêäâí¡Ñðêïõ¡ðç¡×êæø: ¡Ôâ÷êííæ-Õóðêìæ
Saville-Troike, another ethnographer who is fundamentally inline with Hymes’ notion of communicative competence, considers theissue from the viewpoint of second or foreign language contexts. She
distinctly divides a central construct of communicative competence
into three types of knowledge: linguistic, interactional, and cultural
knowledge (Saville-Troike, 1989, 1996). The first one roughly corresponds to what Chomsky formulated as competence, with one lucid
difference: the inclusion of linguistic features that may transmit
social messages as well as referential meanings, in linguistic description. Citing her own experience with a Japanese learner of English
who used the phrase on her term paper “and all that clap” to mean
“etc.”, Saville-Troike argues that recognizing linguistic variations
that carry certain social meanings sometimes pose serious problems
even for advanced students of English. Therefore, knowledge ofthe full range of the linguistic code, including those features thattransmit social information, she concludes, needs to be viewed aspart of one’s communicative competence.
The second property she considers necessary for communicativecompetence is interactional skills, namely the knowledge andexpectation of social norms and conventions. Native speakers ofEnglish know how to execute their talk appropriately in a given
communicative setting, such as how to do turn - taking naturally
when talking to a friend or how to ask someone of a higher status todo something for them. These interactional skills are difﬁcult for students to learn because in many cases they are not taught explicitly
in the classroom. Besides the pronunciation of words, grammaticalȖ¡¡66¡¡Ȗconstruction of sentences, and the use of vocabulary that learners
are presented and learn, according to Saville-Troike, the interaction
patterns are an essential part of communicative competence theyneed to acquire.
Cultural knowledge, especially the social structure of the speechcommunity and the values and attitudes attached to language use, isthe third component for Saville-Troike’s communicative competence.
For example, a native speaker of English can readily identify ways of
speaking that are appropriate for men and women, for children andadults, and for the educated and uneducated. For English learners,
however, it may not be so easy, and if they are not able to recognize
how a group of people “speaks well” in a conversational exchange,and hence fail to act accordingly, they might make themselves atarget of ridicule or imputation or simply offend their conversation
partner. As we can see, these three areas of knowledge Saville-Troike
proposes as basic constituents of one’s communicative competence
are all related to Hymes’ appropriateness in communicative eventsin which interlocutors conduct verbal acts.ɉɉɉɉ

Êïõæóâäõêðïâí¡Âôñæäõô: ¡Èöîñæóû
Perhaps more anthropologically inclined, Gumperz, citing
Goffman’s (1981) “Interactional Order,” which is the organization of
discourse functioning to bridge the linguistic and social elements,
argues that one should look at talk in context as one form of communicative practice. Talk is not “just a matter of individuals’ encoding
and decoding messages” (Gumperz, 2001: 218), but also something bywhich conversationalists attempt to attain their communicative goals
in real-life communicative exchange. Gumperz questions whether
theoretical linguists should use judgment of grammaticality as theȖ¡¡67¡¡Ȗbasis for syntactic analysis. He points out that whether a sentence isgrammatical or not cannot be determined without a speaker’s ability
to imagine a context in which the sentence is interpreted. He is also
aware that the scope of sociolinguistic research on an interlocutor’scommunicative competence has become somewhat narrower, as
many sociolinguists simply preoccupy themselves with finding theoccurrence and distribution of uttered items or verbal strategies inspeech situations based on such external variables as speakers andhearers, audience, settings, and so on (Gumperz, 1997). According
to Gumperz, this approach runs the risk of making sociolinguistics
research on competence “highly particularistic” (1997: 40).
Discussing meaning creation and interpretation at a moregeneral level than the mere sentence level, Gumperz emphasizes theimportance of how interlocutors share signaling conventions necessary to carry on their conversations. One aspect of the productive
and interpretive processes he calls contextualization cues has been of
special interest to him. Contextualization cues, deﬁned as linguistic,
paralinguistic, or interactive features habitually used and perceived
by interlocutors in order to realize this signaling effect, take manydifferent forms such as the selection of a certain style or code, the useof certain syntactic or lexical forms, and strategies involving conversation openings and closings, just to name a few (Gumperz, 1982).
The following brief dialog has a number of contextualization cuesand other discoursive structures contributing to the establishment ofa shared understanding of what is actually happening between thetwo interlocutors:
A: Are you going to be here for ten minutes?
B: Go ahead and take your break. Take longer, if you want.

Ȗ¡¡68¡¡ȖA: I’ll just be outside on the porch. Call me if you need me.
B: OK. Don’t worry.
(Gumperz, 1997: 41)
Gumperz argues that if these two interlocutors’ knowledge
about their language is limited to a sentence-level, grammaticalcorrectness, such a simple message as a request and its acceptancecan not be interpreted and therefore not successfully exchanged.
For example, B’s understanding of A’s first utterance as a request
was possible because B was aware of the illocutionary force of A’squestion and used conversational inference to arrives at a correctinterpretation of A’s intention. Conversational inferences such as
this are cued contextually, according to Gumperz (1997), by rhythmicorganization, utterance prominence to highlight some elements, thesignaling of turn-taking, the choice of discourse strategies that inﬂuence their interpretation, and so on. In summary, Gumperz’s view ofa person’s language competence is that it is a matter that always has
to be discussed in relation to interaction, and the appropriate contextualization to mark communicative conventions is an indispensablefactor for the success in conversational exchange. This runs parallelto the notion of competence developed by Hymes and Saville-Troike,although the focus is different.

Perspectives from Second Language AcquisitionÇðöó¡Âóæâô¡ðç¡Äðîîöïêäâõê÷æ¡Äðîñæõæïäæ: ¡Äâïâíæ¡âïå¡Ôøâêï
In their often - cited article on communicative competence inrelation to second language pedagogy, Canale and Swain (1980)
proposed a theoretical framework in which they outline the contents
and boundaries of three areas of communicative competence: gram-Ȗ¡¡69¡¡Ȗmatical, sociolinguistic, and strategic competence. Sociolinguisticcompetence was further divided by Canale (1983) into two separate
components:¡ sociolinguistic and discourse competence. He definescommunicative competence as “the underlying systems of knowledge
and skill required for communication” (Canale, 1983: 5). What is
intriguing about their framework of communicative competenceis that even the aspects of skills that are needed to employ theknowledge are now assumed to be part of one’s competence. The
communicative competence is, then, distinguished from what Canale
calls “actual communication,” which is defined as “the realizationof such knowledge and skill under limiting psychological and environmental conditions such as memory and perceptual constraints,
fatigue, nervousness, distractions, and interfering backgroundnoises” (Canale, 1983: 5). If we are to compare Canale and Swain’s
construct of communicative competence with that of Chomsky’s
in a broad sense, Chomsky’s “competence” is equivalent to the“grammatical competence” mentioned by Canale and Swain, and allother areas of their framework are lacking in Chomsky’s deﬁnition.
As far as performance is concerned, Chomsky’s performance andCanale and Swain’s actual communication point to roughly the same
phenomenon of uttering sentences in real communicative situations.
The four areas of communicative competence they identified are
brieﬂy outlined below:

Grammatical competence. The mastery of L2 phonologicaland lexicogrammatical rules and rules of sentence formation;that is, to be able to express and interpret literal meaning ofutterances (e.g., acquisition of pronunciation, vocabulary, wordand sentence meaning, construction of grammatical sentences,Ȗ¡¡70¡¡Ȗcorrect spelling, etc.)

Sociolinguistic competence. The mastery of sociocultural rulesof appropriate use of L2; that is, how utterances are produced
and understood in different sociolinguistic contexts (e.g.,understanding of speech act conventions, awareness of normsof stylistic appropriateness, the use of a language to signal
social relationships, etc.)

Discourse competence. The mastery of rules concerning
cohesion and coherence of various kinds of discourse in L2(e.g., use of appropriate pronouns, synonyms, conjunctions,substitution, repetition, marking of congruity and continuity,
topic-comment sequence, etc.)

Strategic competence. The mastery of verbal and non-verbal
communication strategies in L2 used when attempting to compensate for deﬁciencies in the grammatical and sociolinguisticcompetence or to enhance the effectiveness of communication(e.g., paraphrasing, how to address others when uncertain of
their relative social status, slow speech for rhetorical effect,etc.)

As it is clear from the way their framework is described, theirintention was to discover the kinds of knowledge and skills that an
L2 learner needs to be taught and to develop the theoretical basis
for a communicative approach in the second language teachingbased on an understanding of the nature of human communication(Canale and Swain, 1980). In addition, their framework indicatesȖ¡¡71¡¡Ȗthat it is the rules that an L2 learner must learn for accumulation of
their knowledge and skills to be communicatively competent in theuse of their target language and that these rules are not confined
to systematic rules of grammar only but are also applied to all
aspects of a language. Since they put forward their ﬁrst frameworkof communicative competence in detail, there have been numerous
studies that have analyzed it more comprehensively or employ it in
SLA research (Bachman and Palmer, 1982; Kasper and Rose, 2002;
O’Malley and Chamot, 1990; Swain, 1985; Skehan, 1995; Tarone andYule, 1989; Verhoeven, 1997).

Äðîîöïêäâõê÷æ¡Íâïèöâèæ¡Âãêíêõú: ¡ÃâäéîâïɉɉTen years after Canale and Swain had introduced the inﬂuential
framework of communicative competence, a more comprehensive,
stratiﬁed model was proposed by Bachman, who stressed the importance of describing “the processes by which [the] various components
interact with each other and with the context in which language use
occurs” (Bachman, 1990: 81). He pointed out the fact that earlier
theories on language proficiency, particularly the frameworks constructed by Lado (1961) and Carroll (1961, 1968), apparently failed
to take into account the distinction between linguistic knowledge
and the four basic language skills (speaking, listening, writing, andreading), arguing that it was difﬁcult to see whether the knowledge
components were understood in their theories as simply manifested
in the language skills in different modalities and channels, orwhether they are fundamentally different in quality (Bachman,1990).
Using a different terminology for the object of description (Bachman calls it “communicative language ability,” which is abbreviatedȖ¡¡72¡¡Ȗas CLA), he developed three central components for CLA that are
essential to deﬁne one’s competence in communicative language use:
language competence, strategic competence, and psychophysiologicalmechanisms. Of the three, though, only language competence is dealt
with here. The first component he termed as language competence
consists of two parts : organizational competence and pragmaticcompetence. The organizational competence is further divided
into grammatical competence and textual competence. Bachman’s
grammatical competence is consonant with Canale and Swain’s
grammatical competence, in that it comprises abilities to control theformal structure of language. The second one, textual competence,
pertains to the knowledge of conventions for cohesion and coherence
and rhetorical organization. It also includes conventions for language
use in conversations, involving starting, maintaining, and closing
conversations. Bachman’s textual competence can, thus, be said tohave both the part of Canale and Swain’s discourse competence andthe part of their strategic competence.
Bachman’s pragmatic competence, the other element inlanguage competence, mainly focuses on the relationship between
what one says in his or her communicative acts and what functions
he or she intends to perform through his or her utterances. This
concerns illocutionary force of an utterance, or “the knowledge ofpragmatic conventions for performing acceptable language function”(Bachman 1990: 90), which he embodies as illocutionary competence
under the pragmatic competence. Illocutionary competence enables
a speaker to use his or her language to serve a variety of functions
and a hearer to interpret the illocutionary force of an utterance or
discourse required of him or her. One needs, however, more thanillocutionary competence to successfully execute an act to intend aȖ¡¡73¡¡Ȗcertain communicative function; he or she must have knowledge ofappropriateness based on the language use context in which he or
she ﬁnds themselves when engaging in a communicative exchange.
Bachman calls it sociolinguistic competence and this is the othercomponent for his pragmatic competence. To be more precise, Bachman discusses four abilities pertaining to sociolinguistic competence:
ability to be sensitive to regional and social language varieties,
ability to be sensitive to differences in register, ability to produce
and interpret utterances based on naturalness of language use, or
what Pawley and Syder (1983) refer to as a native-like way of communication and ability to understand cultural reference and ﬁguresof speech (Bachman, 1990: 95-98). In his framework, sociolinguisticcompetence and illocutionary competence are put together to forma speaker’s pragmatic competence, which, in turn, composes, alongwith grammatical competence, his or her language competence.

The Role of Communicative Competence in L2 TeachingÕéæ¡Êîñðóõâïäæ¡ðç¡â¡Äðîîöïêäâõêðï -ðóêæïõæå¡Çóâîæøðóì
Adoption of the communication - oriented foreign language
teaching, popularly known as Communicative Language Teaching(CLT), in English classrooms has been repeatedly stressed by SLA
researchers, and indeed, there have been many studies attempting
to determine its effects on L2 learners (Breen and Candlin, 1980;
Canale, 1983; Canale and Swain, 1980; Fillmore, 1979; Kasper andRose, 2002; O’Malley and Chamot, 1990; Oxford, 1990; Swain, 1985;
Skehan, 1995; Tarone and Yule, 1989; Widdowson, 1978). In discussing syllabus design, for example, Canale and Swain (1980) justify
the application of CLT by defending it against the claim that thecommunicatively oriented syllabus tends to be disorganized in terms

Ȗ¡¡74¡¡Ȗof acquisition of grammar. They believe that there are no empirical
data to support it and that the functionally organized communicative
approach is more likely than the grammar-based approach “to havepositive consequences for learner motivation” (Canale and Swain,
1980: 32) as it provides a form of in-class training that makes learners feel more comfortable, confident, and encouraged, with a clear,visible purpose for L2 learning, namely successful communication.
With respect to the use of strategies in learning a target language,
Rubin (1979) describes seven learning strategies typically employed
by a “good language learner” in a second language classroom. While
many of the strategies seem to be rooted in the cognitive processes
for language learning, she claims that a learner’s intent behindthe use of the strategies is a strong drive to communicate, andnot effective understanding of grammatical items presented, andconsequently there is much relevance and value in throwing light onwhat a learner does to develop his or her communicative competence
in classroom activities.

Åæ÷æíðñêïè¡Äðîîöïêäâõê÷æ¡Äðîñæõæïäæ¡âô¡â¡Ñóêîâóú¡Çðäöô¡ðç¡Í³¡Õæâäéêïè
Brown (1994a), viewing CLT as an approach (that is, a theoretical position about the nature of language and of language teaching),
rather than a speciﬁc method of teaching, describes four underlying
characteristics in defining CLT in a second language classroom,
which are summarized below:
ɉɉFocus in a classroom should be on all of the components ofcommunicative competence of which grammatical or linguisticcompetence is just part.

Ȗ¡¡75¡¡Ȗ

Classroom activities should be designed to engage students inthe pragmatic, authentic, and functional use of language formeaningful purposes.

Both fluency and accuracy should be considered equallyimportant in a second language learning classroom. And they
are complementary.

Students have to use their target language, productively andreceptively, in unrehearsed contexts under proper guidance,
but not under the control of a teacher.

(Brown, 1994a: 245)ɉ
It is clear from these characteristics that CLT is a major departure from earlier pedagogical approaches, particularly grammartranslation methods that pay special attention to overt presentationof grammatical rules and translation. And yet there seems to be alittle consensus as to what actually to present to the learners or what
lesson “techniques”1 (Brown, 1994a) to use to enhance their communicative competence and not just their grammatical commands
through CLT. Moreover, Brown (1994b) lists six key words of CLT
to better understand what it aims at: learner-centered, cooperative(collaborative), interactive, integrated, content-centered, and taskbased. They indicate supposedly ways in which language teachingis conducted communicatively, and so reflect the abovementioned
characteristics of CLT.
I presume that many teachers of English at the college levelȖ¡¡76¡¡Ȗacross Japan are currently employing techniques or methods basedon at least some of these key CLT words, if they are given a place todo so. Indeed, I myself always try to structure the required English
classes I teach at Sophia Junior College as communicatively as
possible, by taking these interconnected features of CLT into consideration. It is difﬁcult, however, to ensure that my students become
communicatively more competent through classroom activities I provide for them. Given that in Japan the students are leaning English
as a foreign language, the very fact that their communicative use in
English outside the classroom is bound to be limited, their successin acquiring communicative competence in their target language is
not as easily obtained as understanding of grammar. In the following
section, a few suggestions are offered for foreign language teachers
to help make their syllabus communicatively oriented, which can beapplied most effectively to integrative English classes. They are theuse of audiovisual recordings, role-playing, and explicit teaching ofspeech acts.

Öôæ¡ðç¡Âöåêð÷êôöâí¡Óæäðóåêïèô
L2 learners can beneﬁt from viewing and reviewing audiovisual
recordings such as videotapes and visual hypermedia software of
their own communicative interactions and model interactions by
native speakers. In learning how to make requests, for example, thestudents can not only participate in, say, pair work as part of theirfunction-building exercise, but also film their actual performance
to collect data for analysis. The data ideally cover a wide range ofsituations in which they make or receive requests, in terms of social
status and role of interlocutors, degree of imposition internal to theact of the request being made, and so on. Through close examinationȖ¡¡77¡¡Ȗof their recordings and introspection, the students will have a chance
to reflect on what they said to make requests (grammatical competence). To measure the success of the students’ performance, theteacher can, then, play a video clip that shows model performance bynative speakers of the target language, in order for them to see how
different or similar their communicative performance of requests
is, when contrasted with how native speakers execute the same act.
Here, the students can both review their grammatical precisionin use and learn about the sociocultural appropriateness of thecommunicative event. Moreover, the very nature of the audiovisualmaterial enables the students to see and analyze their own andnative speaker’s nonverbal communication as well. It is, thus, advisable that the students study their own communicative experienceand the nature and characteristics of social interaction in theirtarget language so as to develop their L2 sociolinguistic competence(Erickson, 1996).
One major difﬁculty facing the use of videotapes this way, however, is the lack of availability of sources of the model interaction.
Unlike the environment that surrounds students learning English
as their second language in English speaking countries, whichmost likely provides them with lots of language input, whether
they be communicative or not, outside their classroom, for the
majority of Japanese college students learning English as a foreign
language, the access to such sources is quite limited outside theclassroom. This limitation makes it difﬁcult for the teacher to collectaudiovisual data on video. One way to compensate for that problem
is to ask native speakers of the students’ target language to performthe relevant acts and ﬁlm them, although what the students look at
is then no longer a naturally occurring conversation. Or, the teacherȖ¡¡78¡¡Ȗmay turn to existing audiovisual materials, such as TV talk shows,TV dramas, or movies. We may not be able to draw a direct comparison between the students’ performance and that of TV personalities,
in terms of the contents of request and social situations in which theact of request is made. Nevertheless, these are valuable visual andauditory stimuli for the students, and there is much to be gained
through reviewing reﬂectively their own communicative performanceand recognizing how different it is from the way the native speakersof their target language perform.

Óðíæ -ñíâú ɉ
Role-play is an effective way to develop students’ communicativecompetence, especially the sociolinguistic and strategic competence
discussed in Canale and Swain’s (1980) framework. It also helps
the students acquire what Saville-Troike (1996) describes as interactional knowledge. Learning a language for a wide range of socialand expressive functions requires more than just learning word- andsentence-formation, correct pronunciation, and orthography; rather,
one learns “a system of use whose rules and norms are an integral
part of culture” (Schiffrin, 1996 : 323). In other words, language
learning should be a dynamic process and a means to acquire
knowledge to act appropriately in a cultural group. For this end tobe met, a teacher needs to provide the students with chances to act
and interact verbally in the classroom. In the discussion of the useof audiovisual recordings above, it was suggested that the students
tape-record their own communicative performance for introspec tion and reflection. Their performance to be recorded can best be
analyzed for this purpose through spontaneous role-plays. Usually,
role-plays are properly framed, yet open-ended, bilateral, interactive,Ȗ¡¡79¡¡Ȗand above all, highly contextualized in nature. However, Clark(1987), acknowledging the value of role-plays in a foreign language
classroom, cautions us that a form of role-play in which the students
simply act out a predetermined script made by someone else would
result in mere memorization of stereotypical expressions that may or
may not have real-life application in actual communicative exchange.
Instead, the teacher must structure his or her role-plays in a waythat their students engage in “role-making” and “role-negotiating” asthey interact.ɉɉɉ
Going back to Brown’s (1994b) list of the six key words of CLT,
we can say that role - plays that encompass the role - negotiating
aspects in them have, though in a loose sense, all six characteristics.
They are learner-centered activities that call for collaboration of theinteracting participants, and there are invariably communicative
goals to be accomplished by the participants, who produce andinterpret sentences for the exchange of social as well as referential
meaning. This approach makes role-plays one of the most effective
or even crucial techniques to be employed in CLT to build one’s
sociolinguistic and strategic competence.

Ôñææäé¡Âäõô ɉ
The speech act, or performative use of language, is an area thatmany Japanese students have trouble dealing with. It is because
speech acts are generally difﬁcult for L2 learners to realize in termsof grammar and vocabulary, formulas and conventionalized expressions, and sociocultural difference between their L1 and L2, andbecause in many cases Japanese students are not taught explicitly inthe classroom how to signal their intent in performing an illocutionary act, beyond the semantic meanings of syntactic structures.

Ȗ¡¡80¡¡Ȗ

The knowledge needed to perform and understand illocutionary
acts constitutes part of communicative competence and is included
in Canale’s (1983) sociolinguistic competence and in Bachman’s(1990) illocutionary competence under pragmatic ability. When alearner fails to make or respond to an appropriate speech act, it issaid that sociopragmatic failure has occurred. Likewise, a learner’s
deviation from the standard patterns of executing the act is called
pragmalinguistic failure (Thomas, 1983). Below is an example ofcommunicative failure in an act of apology that I have come across.2
Here, two students, playing the role of classmates, are instructedto perform the speech act, according to a pre-selected situation in
response to the Discourse Completion Task. Student B borrowed
Student A’s notebook for an upcoming exam, but accidentally ruined
it. Now, Student A asks Student B to return it to her.

Student A :ɉI need the notebook I lent you. Do you have itɉɉɉɉɉɉnow?
Student B:ɉI’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I was bad. I’m sorry .
ɉɉɉɉɉɉCan you excuse me?
Student A:ɉWell ...ɉThere is clear evidence of pragmalinguistic failure in Student
B’s apology, namely a linguistically inappropriate way of making an
apology that fails to conform to the native-speaker norm. First, B
does not respond to the question “Do you have it now?” with a yesor no. Then, B repeats “I’m sorry” three times with a semanticallyincorrect sentence of “I was bad” (the student may have meant “I
did a bad thing”) followed by, again, semantically and pragmaticallyinappropriate “Can you excuse me?” at the end. Student B’s apology,Ȗ¡¡81¡¡Ȗif used in a real communicative situation with a native speaker ofEnglish, will most likely be unacceptable under normal circum stances. It is clear that students will not be able to make an apology
or a request, or express gratitude by learning discrete grammaticalitems. There will be very little room in a grammar-focused syllabus
to offer the students a chance to know that Americans more or lesstend to include an explanation of why and how something happened
that leads them to apologize (Yoshida et al., 2000). 3 Moreover,the number of “I’m sorry” uttered in their act of apology does notdetermine how sincerely they are apologizing. Also, in this example,
we can note a clear-cut case of L1 transfer in the repeated use of“I’m sorry” and the lack of explanation, which are often seen in theJapanese style of apology. All this indicates that the students do
not necessarily “pick up” complex speech behavior and sociocultural
strategies and sociolinguistic forms. Therefore, explicit teaching ofspeech act strategies will be needed for students to gain illocutionary
competence (Cohen, 1996).
ɉ One thing that the teacher must keep in mind whenincorporating the practice of speech acts in the form of, say, role-play,into his or her syllabus is that students should not be drawn by theteacher to blindly accept the native-speaker norms of performing an
act. Speech acts are culture speciﬁc and some students consciously
avoid “imitating” native-speaker norms and choose to stick with
their own styles. After all, language learning is very much reﬂectedin the degree to which one identiﬁes with the target culture, and if
we would like language learning to be communicative, the learner’sautonomy should be maintained as much as possible. As foreign
language teachers, our contribution will be to inform the students
what native speakers in general tend to say to apologize, forȖ¡¡82¡¡Ȗexample, and how and why they say it, as a mere fact. Then, it is up
to them to adopt the native-speaker norms of apology and practicethem on their own. As we have seen, the ability to perform speechacts is an important aspect of one’s communicative competence. But
at the same time, because it is deeply related to the cultural valuesof speakers, the teacher should deal with it with care.

Conclusion
Communicative competence have been defined and discussed
in many different ways by language scholars of different fields.
There is, however, one thing in common that is seen in the writingsof all these scholars: linguistic, or grammatical competence, should
be considered just one aspect of overall competence an individual
has with language. With the change of focus from grammar to communication within linguistic theories (as the ﬁeld of sociolinguistics
developed), L2 language teachers and researchers, too, haveshifted the object of their linguistic analysis accordingly. Althoughteachers and researchers are aware of the need to improve students’communicative competence and try out new ideas to contribute tomeeting that need, there seems to be still a long way to go. In thispaper, three suggestions were made to add extra communicativenessto the teaching syllabus. They are not new ideas for L2 teaching, buteach one of them has a place in CLT and will help language learners
acquire the knowledge of appropriateness in all facets of their target
language.

End Notesɉ

1¯¡ According to Brown (1994a), “techniques” refer to all formsof exercises, activities, or even devices used in the languageȖ¡¡83¡¡Ȗclassroom for realizing lesson objectives.

ɉ

2¯¡ This conversational data was based on a low - level student’s
response to the Discourse Completion Task (DCT) administeredin one of my English skill classes.ɉ

3¯¡ Yoshida et al., in writing an English textbook for college studentsɉin Japan for the purpose of raising their pragmatic awareness,
discovered an interesting comparison between Americans andJapanese as to how to apologize. Among the four semantic
formulas of apology-apology (e.g., “I’m sorry”), make-up (e.g.,“Can I make it up to you?”), care (e.g., “Please don’t be mad”)
and explanation (e.g., “There was a train accident [and that is
why I am late]”), the explanation formula ranked the highest for
Americans, whereas Japanese predominantly used the apology
formula, with only half the number of explanations compared toAmericans.ɉ

Âäìïðøíæåèîæïõ
I would like to thank Melvin R. Andrade for his comments and assistance inproofreading an early draft of this paper.

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