The ability of language is either an end to itself, or a means to another end, such as graduate study, study abroad, preparation for field work or for professional practice?. So, like this there are many ways to specify language ability and to learn and teach languages.
The best known models of language ability is known as "Communicative Competence." This model was developed for the people who need much knowledge to use the language in meaningful interaction.
There are four components of language competence:
- Grammatical Competence
- Discourse Competence
- Sociolinguistic Competence
- Strategic Competence
- Grammatical competence is the ability to
Recognize and produce the identifiable grammatical structures of a language and to use them effectively in communication.
To use the forms of the language (sounds, words, and sentence structure).
In Discourse Competence, there will be a creation of the forms of the language which are longer than sentences, such as stories, conversations, or business letters. Discourse competence includes understanding how particular instances of language use are internally constructed.
Sociolinguistic Competence, overlaps with discourse competence because it has to do with expressing, interpreting and negotiating meaning according to culturally-derived norms and expectations. In this, we mainly express the formality and familiarity of the persons.
Strategic competence discusses on lack of abilities in above areas such as whenever you don't know a word that you need, what will you do. Here managing skills are necessary to convince people when you don't know some thing to speak by applying some strategies
Example for strategic competence is: if you are hungry, but you are unable to speak the language, you can probably still make your need known through gesture and facial expression because hunger is a universal fact of human life. Language learners who really need to communicate in their adopted language tend to develop a number of strategies for making themselves clear in spite of their incomplete knowledge.
