It was Chomski, who drew a fundamental distinction between linguistic competence and linguistic performance of a speaker. Chomsky said that 'competence consists of the mental representations of linguistic rules that constitute the spaekrs-hearer's internal grammar. ... Performance consists of the use of this grammar in the comprehension and production of language' (Chomsky, 1965). A speaker's knowledge of the language rules is reffered to as competence and the actual use of those rules is reffered to as performance. Chomsky urged linguists to be more concerned with the study of competence, instead of focusing on performance of speakers. Performance is not adequate indicator of language knowledge, as it can be influenced by a number of factors such as noise, lack of concetration, tiredness, nervousness, speech impairment, situation,...
Competence is knowledge of rules and structures in the languages. To one degree competence is knowledge of which language learner may not be always aware. Speakers can use their competence to identify performance errors.
Speakers can produce sounds, which represent meanings. This is the case with all speakers of any language, including users of a sign language, who produce signs, which form meanings. Speakers produce sentences without being aware of linguistic terminology of a grammatical structure that they have just produced. For example, speakers produce sentence without thinking about the linguistic terminology. Speakers may produce a sentence like 'It has been raining for two days and it is going to rain for the next two as well.' And they may not be aware that what they have just said contains two clauses, past participle and so on. The speaker does not need to know that 'been' is a past participle. Thus competence is knowing the rules without the ability to explain linguistic elements and rules that govern the grammar in the text (sentence).
In second language we often consciously learn sounds, meanings and rules. Competence is therefore less 'natural', but this does not imply that second language speakers are necessarily aware of linguistic knowledge behind the sound and meaning structures they are making to convey their messages. Second language learners learn rules, but it is a question of performance, if they can also 'practically' use what they learned. Performance in a second language depends on different factors, such as mental, physical, emotional. That's why teachers shouldn't concetrate on performance only, but mostly on competence. Yet, it is often performance that is commonly judged in class-type situation.
The relationship between competence and performance is complicated in terms of learner's assessment. To put it simply, our language competence or knowledge enables us 'to combine words to form phrases, and phrases to form sentences' (Fromkin, 1986). There is an important difference between what one klnows and how one uses that knowledge. The concrete usage of linguyistic competence is linguistic performance.
Bibliography:
1. Chomsky, N. (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Synax. Cambridge: MIT Press.
2. Chrystal, D. (1995) Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
3. Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., Collins, P. & Blair, D. (1986) An Introduction to Language. Sydney: Hold, Rinehart and Winston. |
