Language and Communication: Attaining Communicative Competence by Participants

Abstract

Observations on the use of language to communicate have revealed that most participants in various communicative situations lack communicative competence. Communicative competence involves a set of composite skills which include grammatical, socio-linguistic and strategic competence (communication strategies).

The researcher is disturbed by the fact that many language users, who claim to have attained linguistic competence, have not actually attained communicative competence owing to their inability to apply communicative strategies in order to succeed in doing what people use language in doing.

There are, however, factors that are responsible for this problem but which can be solved by the knowledge of ethnography of communication and those factors that are relevant in understanding how a particular communication event achieves its objectives. These, of course, form the crux of this study.

Recommendations have been made here, among others, that participants should carefully inculcate the rules of language use as well as communication strategies so that their knowledge of rules of grammar will be adequate. Again, awareness of the various factors that are relevant in speaking is necessary.

This paper, therefore, believes that if participants could use language accurately, appropriately, and flexibly to communicate their ideas, emotions and messages, they will attain communicative competence.