Understanding Language Competence: A Guide to Key Concepts
CEFR
The CEFR (Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) is a document for the teaching of languages. It provides a common basis for the elaboration of language syllabuses, curriculum guidelines, examinations, textbooks, etc. across Europe. It describes what language learners have to learn to do in order to use a language for communication and what knowledge and skills they have to develop to act effectively. The Framework also defines levels of proficiency which allow learners’ progress to be measured at each stage of learning and on a life-long basis.
Competence
Competence is the sum of the necessary knowledge, skills, and characteristics that allow a person to perform an action.
Plurilingualism
Plurilingualism is a situation wherein a person who has competence in more than one language can switch between languages – from one language to another and vice versa – according to the circumstances at hand for the purpose of coping with a social matter. There is a distinction between plurilingualism and multilingualism. Multilingualism, on the other hand, is connected to situations wherein multiple languages exist side-by-side in a society but are utilized separately. Plurilingualism is derived from bilingualism.
Strategy
A strategy is any organized, purposeful, and regulated line of action chosen by an individual to carry out a task which he or she sets for himself or herself or with which he or she is confronted.
Strategies (general and communicative) provide a vital link between the different competences that the learner has (innate or acquired) and successful task completion.
Therefore, strategies are a means the language user exploits to mobilize and balance his or her resources, to activate skills and procedures, in order to fulfill the demands of communication in context and successfully complete the task in question in the most comprehensive or most economical way feasible depending on his or her precise purpose.
Task
Tasks are a feature of everyday life in the personal, public, educational, or occupational domains. Task accomplishment by an individual involves the strategic activation of specific competences in order to carry out a set of purposeful actions in a particular domain with a clearly defined goal and a specific outcome. Tasks can be extremely varied in nature and may involve language activities to a greater or lesser extent. A task may be quite simple or extremely complex. A particular task may involve a greater or lesser number of steps or embedded sub-tasks and consequently the boundaries of any one task may be difficult to define.
Intercultural Personality
Attitudes and personality greatly affect their ability to learn. The development of an “intercultural personality” involving both attitudes and awareness raises ethical and pedagogic issues, such as:
- The extent to which personality development can be an explicit educational objective;
- How cultural relativism is to be reconciled with ethical and moral integrity; Which personality factors: a) facilitate b) impede foreign or second language learning and acquisition;
- How learners can be helped to exploit strengths and overcome weaknesses;
- How the diversity of personalities can be reconciled with the constraints imposed on and by educational systems.
Epistemology
Epistemology concerns the principles of a scientific method. That is, we need a conceptual framework made up by: objectives and function, sources and scientific elements and the relation between them.
Linguistics
Linguistic competences include lexical, phonological, syntactical knowledge and skills and other dimensions of language as a system, independently of the sociolinguistic value of its variations and the pragmatic functions of its realizations. This component, considered here from the point of view of a given individual’s communicative language competence, relates not only to the range and quality of knowledge but also to cognitive organization and the way this knowledge is stored and to its accessibility.
Contrastive Linguistics
Contrastive linguistics is a practice-oriented linguistic approach that seeks to describe the differences and similarities between a pair of languages (hence it is occasionally called “differential linguistics”).
Pragmatic Competence
Pragmatic competences are concerned with the functional use of linguistic resources (production of language functions, speech acts), drawing on scenarios or scripts of interactional exchanges. It also concerns the mastery of discourse, cohesion and coherence, the identification of text types and forms, irony, and parody. For this component even more than the linguistic component, it is hardly necessary to stress the major impact of interactions and cultural environments in which such abilities are constructed.
Pragmatic competences are concerned with the user/learner’s knowledge of the principles according to which messages are:
- Organized, structured, and arranged (‘discourse competence’);
- Used to perform communicative functions (‘functional competence’);
- Sequenced according to interactional and transactional schemata (‘design competence’).