Assignment 3: Celce-Murcia, Dornyei, & Thurrel's model of CoCo (1995)

Widdowson (1989, p. 135), cited by Celce-Murcia, Dornyei and Thurrell (1995), said that:

Communicative competence is not a matter of knowing rules for the composition of sentences and being able to employ such rules to assemble expressions from scratch as and when occasion requires. It is much more a matter of knowing a stock of partially pre-assembled patterns, formulaic frameworks, and a kit of rules, so to speak, and being able to apply the rules to make whatever adjustments are necessary according to contextual standards.


Five competencies model according to Celce-Murcia, Dornyei, and Thurrell:
1. Discourse competence
Discourse competence concerns the selection, sequencing, and arrangement of words, structures, sentences and utterances to achieve a unified spoken or written text.
There are many sub-areas that contribute to discourse competence: cohesion, deixis, coherence, generic structure, and the conversational structure inherent to the turn-taking system in conversation.

2. Linguistic competence
Linguistic competence is historically the most thoroughly discussed component of our model and, for this reason, our discussion of it will be very brief.
It comprises the basic elements of communication: the sentence patterns and types, the constituent structure, the morphological inflections, and the lexical resources, as well as the phonological and orthographic systems needed to realize communication as speech or writing

3. Actional competence
Actional competence is defined as competence in conveying and understanding communicative intent, that is, matching actional intent with linguistic form based on the knowledge of an inventory of verbal schemata that carry illocutionary force (speech acts and speech act sets).
It must be noted that the conceptualization of actional competence is mainly restricted to oral communication; a close parallel to actional competence in written communication would be "rhetorical competence," which includes analysis of the "moves" and "lexical routines" typical of any given written genre.

4. Sociocultural competence
Sociocultural competence refers to the speaker's knowledge of how to express messages appropriately within the overall social and cultural context of communication, in accordance with the pragmatic factors related to variation in language use.
There are four variables in this competence: social contextual factors, stylistic appropriateness factors, cultural factors, non-verbal communicative factors.

5. Strategic competence
Strategic competence is knowledge of communication strategies and how to use them.

There are five strategies: avoidance or reduction strategies, achievement or compensatory strategies, staling or time-gaining strategies, self-monitoring strategies, interactional strategies.

References: Celce-Murcia, M., Dornyei, Z. and Thurrell, S. (1995) Communicative Competence: A Pedagogically Motivated Model with Content Specifications, http://escholarship.ucop.edu/uc/item/2928w4zj#page-1, accessed April 9, 2012 on 7.32 pm.