Foreign language

Introduction

Towards intercultural

Communicative competence

In ELT

Cem Alptekin

This article questions the validity of the pedagogic model based on the native

speaker-based notion of communicative competence. With its standardized

native speaker norms, the model is found to be utopian, unrealistic, and

constraining in relation to English as an International Language (EIL). It is

utopian not only because native speakership is a linguistic myth, but also

because it portrays a monolithic perception of the native speaker’s language

and culture, by referring chiefly to mainstream ways of thinking and behaving.

It is unrealistic because it fails to reflect the lingua franca status of English. It is

constraining in that it circumscribes both teacher and learner autonomy by

associating the concept of authenticity with the social milieu of the native

speaker.

A new notion of communicative competence is needed, one which recognizes

English as a world language. This would encompass local and international

contexts as settings of language use, involve native–nonnative and

nonnative–nonnative discourse participants, and take as pedagogic models

successful bilinguals with intercultural insights and knowledge. As such, it

would aim at the realization of intercultural communicative competence

in ELT.

Although there have been reformulations of the different components of

knowledge that underlie Canale and Swain’s influential model of

communicative competence, the model—in its slightly modified form by

Canale (1983)—still forms the conventional framework for curriculum

design and classroom practice associated with communicative language

teaching in many an educational context.

The notion of communicative competence described in the model entails

four competencies, which are commonly referred to as grammatical

competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, and

strategic competence. The first and foremost is grammatical or formal

competence, which refers to the Chomskyan concept of linguistic

competence; it is the native speaker’s knowledge of the syntactic, lexical,

morphological, and phonological features of the language, as well as the

capacity to manipulate these features to produce well-formed words and

sentences. It provides the linguistic basis for the rules of usage which

normally result in accuracy in performance.

ELT Journal Volume 56/1 January 2002 © Oxford University Press 57

Foreign language

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