Marginalized Knowledge: An Agenda for Indigenous Knowledge Development and Integration with Other Forms of Knowledge

Linguistic competence versus communicative competence

One of the major concerns in the field of language teaching is how learners can be assisted to use the target language, as a central feature of their formal and social interaction, in order to achieve better education, and do things well which are important or essential to their everyday existence. Obviously, this concern demands the conceptualizing of the users’ competence as a broad version of competence that encompasses more than the linguistic competence whose most influential exponent is Noam Chomsky (1957 and 1965). This broad version consists of three components, socio-linguistic, discourse and strategic competence.

Dell Hymes (1972) and many others use the term Communicative Competence to signal the fact that competent use of language involves elements of what Chomsky tried to exclude from the domains of grammatical theory. It is now accepted that language use varies according to context and that such variation is systematic and not random. Gumperz (1971), especially, has been interested in the ways in which an individual who speaks more than one language draws on his or her multiple linguistic repertoire, choosing to switch from one code to another to signal more or less subtle features of the communicative exchange.

Among the applied linguists who have a notable interest in a broad version of competence are Canale and Swain (1980), as well as Savignon (1985). According to Canale and Swain (1980:27-310) communicative competence consists, of grammatical competence, socio-linguistic competence, and communication strategies or strategic competence. The first of these competencies includes knowledge of words, and rules of their morphology, syntax, sentence grammar, semantics, and phonology. The second consists of two sets of rules, socio-cultural rules and rules of discourse.

Knowledge of both these rules is crucial to the interpretation of utterances for social meaning. Strategic competence consists of verbal and non-verbal strategies of communication that may be employed to compensate for communication breakdown arising from performance factors or to insufficient competence. The first kind would include the ability to paraphrase grammatical forms that a person has not mastered or cannot recall, momentarily, and the second would involve the various role-playing tactics, for example, how a speaker is to address a stranger whose social status is unknown to him or her.

With this background in mind let us turn to the socio-linguistic situation in most Southern African countries.