Communicative Competence Analysis. What is communicative competence?

According to Dell Hynes communicative competence is the ability to interpret messages and negotiate meaning with specific contexts. So, communicative competence is the ability any human being has in order to transmit and interpret messages (Brown , 2007). But, how a person is going to understand or interpret a message? The message is going to be interpreted through the context or the situation in that specific moment. Context takes an important role in communication, example: people who work as doctors, they communicate among them by using some technical words, those words are kind of hard to understand for other people, but that is because of the context. Another important part we have to take in consideration is the distinction that Dell Hynes made between linguistic and communicative, he explains linguistic as the knowledge about the language forms, so it has to do with the study of the language not the usage of the language, and communicative as the knowledge that enables a person to communicative functionally and interactively, this is related with the approach Chomsky made about Universal Grammar James Cummins made on his research, a distinction between two terms, which are cognitive/academic language proficiency (CALP) and basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS), CALP is the one which is used in the classroom and tests that focus on form. (BICS) is the communicative capacity that all children acquire in order communicate with other people every day. There are some categories we have to take in consideration, when it refers to communicative competence, grammatical competence has to do with knowledge we have about the language, the rules of morphology, phonology, semantic, and all those kind of stuffs, and we have discourse has to do with everything from simple spoken conversations, until articles or essays we have written, grammatical and discourse reflect the use of the linguistic. Sociolinguistic is how people use the language in society, how people from another place speak different from other, besides rich people do not speak the same way poor people do, because the educational level is different, and last category is strategic, it defines as verbal and nonverbal communications strategies. (MIchael Canale, Merrill Swain, 1980)

Language functions. There are some essentially purposes that we accomplish with language: stating, requesting, greetings, responding, but, all those accomplish need to be form by the use of grammar rules, morphemes, words, so, we cannot accomplish anything without the form of the language. Michael Halliday provided one of the expositions of language functions, and he outlined seven different functions of language. The first one is instrumental; it happens when you manipulate the environment by giving a command, so, what you get is a change in a particular condition. Regulatory is when you want to take the control of events. The third one is representational; it is used to make some statements, convey facts and knowledge. Interactional, when you want to speak or communicate with someone you can use some kind of slangs, jokes, but, you need to know how and when you can use them. Personal, it allows to speaker to express his feeling, emotions. Heuristic involves many things like acquiring the knowledge, and to learn about the environment. Imaginative to create ideas, fairy tales through the imaginative dimensions of language we can go beyond the real word, we can do so many thing by our imagination.