Competence

learners by integrating language and culture. This is found to be

both ‘pedagogically and educationally sensible’, as it is said to offer

‘a multidimensional perspective or experience’ for the learners

(Porto 1996). Integrating language and culture is seen by some as

the fundamental purpose of language learning, for (so the belief goes)

it gives learners experience of another language, and a different way

of coping with reality. It also enables them to use the language as it is

used by its native speakers. In the case of English, for instance,

EFL teachers are asked not only to familiarize their students with

the cultural characteristics of Britain but also to increase their

awareness of the cultural diversity of the country, while at the same

time teaching a standard variety of English so as not to offend the

native speakers, and to be understood by them (Bex 1994). This, in

fact, leads many an ELT educator to train their students to improve

their sociolinguistic competence in English or, worse, to ‘act’ in

English, as they are believed to ‘need to become English-speaking

people, different from the people who speak their native language,

assuming the body language, intonation, and life view of English

speakers’ (Latulippe 1999).

Having thus reviewed the basic tenets of the communicative orthodoxy,

this paper questions the validity of the pedagogic model whose focus is

on native speaker competence in the target language setting. This is

discussed in reference to ELT under three different headings, by

examining the utopian, unrealistic, and constraining essence of the

notion of communicative competence from the viewpoint of English as

an International Language (EIL).

Communicative competence, with its standardized native speaker norms, is as

utopian as the notion of the idealized native speaker-listener: It was the

concern with meaning which gave rise to attempts to take issue with

Chomsky’s construct of linguistic competence. The ideal native speaker-

listener was considered to be a nonexistent abstraction, and emphasis

was placed instead on the real native speaker-listener in relation to

language use or language performance. Hence, it became necessary to

integrate the linguistic code with a small ‘c’ concept of culture, referring

to daily customs and ways of life, and mainstream ways of thinking and

behaving. Members of a given culture, according to this view, are said to

behave and to interpret the behaviour of others in reference to the

communicative systems they have available to them. It is this monolithic

perception of language and culture that has made the current native

speaker-based model of communicative competence utopian in

character. Languages, English included, often have several dialects. One

cannot claim that there is one correct and appropriate way to use English,

in the sense that one set of language patterns is somehow inherently

superior to all the others. If certain language patterns are preferred over

others, this is certainly done according to social values and not according

to linguistic norms. If preferred language patterns, commonly associated

with accuracy and appropriacy, are the outcome of judgements of social

acceptability within the English-speaking culture—along the lines of

Kachru’s (1986) ‘Inner Circle’ contexts (e.g. England), it follows that it

Towards intercultural communicative competence 59

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