Communicative Competence

One of the most important things in human beings is the language, we know that nowadays exist many languages around the world, dialects and so on, since ancient times it have been used for different purposes, but one the most necessary point it was developed for the need of communicate, every human have found the different ways in how to transmit something that is in mind, with different skills in communicative way, and here it is included the competences, according to Hymes: Communicative Competence is the ability to convey and interpret messages and to negotiate meaning, this means that communication it is not just something spoken, we need to know how to tell it, what is the best form and another point is: how we can understand, In my mindset this is an important point in a conversation, because if you are not able in understanding , perhaps, you are going to think bad, and reply bad. We have to be aware in two different aspects, one is: Cognitive/ academic language proficiency (CALP) and Basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS), (CALP) is academic as the word says, this is referring how someone learns vocabulary but in a specific area, for instance: students, doctor etc. We use different words depending of the context, and (BICS) is in all areas with anyone, how they acquire a language, it could be in a house or any place, concerning with the communicative competences, here we got some categories: Grammatical Competence: in this we got lexical, it refers the whole vocabulary that someone has and the ability to learn new, and also it is included morphology, how we structure the word that we use in our mind, and not forgetting: Syntax, semantic and phonology, and why this? If we think in communicative competence, we have to develop different skills for example if we want to tell convey a message, we are going to organize the word before talking, and semantic is how we represent the meaning in our mind with different phrases, and phonology how we articulate all sound that we use.

Discourse Competence: we can see this as the ability to connect word with each other, in what we can create any kind of speech. And other competence that we can find is: Sociolinguistic, it is the knowledge about sociocultural rules, because we can have interactions with other: family friends and so on, but the person has to develop this competence another thing included, it is pragmatics and as we know the context is the most important, because the context influences in the meaning of the words, in the same way, it is strategic Competence; verbal and nonverbal language so body language, this is the most confusing, because if you are not capable to develop you are going to tell something with your mouth, but another thing with your body. Moreover, when we talk about communicative competence, we are not referring just a type of person, because this exist with everyone, just an example: when someone has good competences she/he knows when he have to change the conversation, it could be in a soccer play, you know that in a play, you are going to talk about soccer not about science or another thing, in those kind of situation we can find different culture, rules and so on. The components that exist in language competence are: Knowledge structure, it is about knowledge of the words that you are going to tell, depending of the place or context that you are, for example if you are in a church you know that you have to be polite, the second one is language competence, this mean that language that you already know, we can find most difficult to tell something when we are learning a second language if we dont know much vocabulary or maybe you are going to have interferences between your mother tongue, third one is: strategic competence, your gesture of your tone of voice, then psychological mechanism, it is how we process the language in our mind, and after context of situation. (Brown., 2007)

Reference:
Brawn, D. (2007). Communicative Competence. En D. Brawn, Principles of Language Learning and Teaching by Douglas Brown. (pgs. 245-270). N.Y: longman.