engleski

The relationship between discourse competence and other communicative competence components

The period since the 1980s has seen numerous attempts at presenting the relationship among the components in the implied structure of communicative competence through specific models. Thus, in the last three decades, a number of communicative models have been developed, such as Canale and Swain's (1980), Canale's (1983, 1984), Savignon's (1983), Bachman's (1990), Cohen's (1994), Celce-Murcia's, Dörnyei and Thurrell's (1995), Bachman and Palmer's (1996), Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) (2005) etc. The analyses of the aforementioned models revealed the problems of both the conceptualisation of discourse competence and the relationship between discourse competence and other components of communicative competence. Special attention was drawn to the relationship between discourse, grammatical, and pragmatic competence. The study of communicative competence of secondary school learners of English (N=56) and learners of German (N=57) presented in this paper focuses on the analysis of the discourse competence level, and the ways in which discourse competence is related to other components of communicative competence. The results of the t-test showed statistically significant differences in the levels of discourse competence between English learners and German learners. The correlation analysis showed strong correlations between discourse, grammatical and pragmatic competence in both samples. The fact that these components were not extracted as separate factors in either of the languages further supports regarding communicative competence components as being of permeated nature. These findings cast doubt on the rigid division of discourse, grammatical and pragmatic competence in the existing theoretical models of communicative competence.

communicative competence, discourse competence, German as a foreign language, English as a foreign language, t-test, correlation, factor analysis

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