My language, your culture: whose communicative competence?

Abstract

The paper examines the notion of 'communicative competence' specifically with reference to transplanted varieties of English (e.g. Indian English) used in various nowwestern sociocultural contexts in the world. It is claimed that the notion of communicative competence that relies on the traditional notion of 'competence' of a native speaker is misleading for understanding and interpreting English texts written in these contexts by, for example, Indians and Africans. The examples presented here show that the judgements of native speakers with regard to deviations (or innovations) in such varieties of English are as much based on attitudinal factors, as on genuine expectations in the context of verbal interaction. The concepts intelligibility and interpretubility are viewed from the perspective of the conventions (literary, cultural and so on) developed in the institutionalized non-native varieties of English. The examples are taken from written. texts, and several theoretical and methodological questions are raised.WHEN approaching a language transplanted to a new cultural and linguistic context-as, for example, English in India-one is brought to various sorts of realizations about the notion of Language and the Varieties that a language may develop. Communicative competence, the ability to put a language to use in appropriate ways in culturally defined contexts, may become a problematical notion when applied in the situation of such a transplanted language, because the cultural contexts that defined 'appropriateness' in the parent situation are not necessarily the same in the new situation.One must note that very different sorts of problems arise depending on what culture the observer is from. For one from the 'donor' language community, questions are mostly variations on 'What has happened to our language?' For one from the adopting culture, the questions are more varied, including 'Why is this language here? Why do I/we need it? What will it do to my/our sense of ourselves as Indians/Africans/Nigerians?'The notion of Varieties of a language and the corollary notion of Non-native varieties are now commonplace. However, it cannot be denied that a misguided attitude disallowing the legitimacy of the notion of a 'non-native' variety of English does exist. Indian graduate students in India were asked in a survey to label their English as Indian, British, American, or other: only about half, 56%, identified themselves as Indian English users (Kachru, 1976). When asked to identify their preference of a model of English to be adhered to in formal instruction, about 67% of both faculty and graduate students in this survey responded 'British English'; only 2390 of the graduate students and 27% of the faculty admitted to a preference for Indian English (Kachru, 1982a: 44). Bamgbose (1982: 99-100) wrote, 'One noticeable effect of the refusal to accept the existence of a Nigerian English is the perpetuation of the myth that the English taught in Nigerian schools is just the same as, say, British English; a corollary myth ...

Towards Defining a Valid Assessment Criterion of Pronunciation Proficiency in Non-Native English-Speaking Graduate Students

“…This is a crucial first step in ''write(ing) pronunciation back into the instructional equation" on a large scale (Morley, 1991, p. 488), in giving pronunciation the credibility and accessibility that it requires in the worlds of pronunciation research, pedagogy, and assessment, and in inspiring aspiring pronunciation proponents to do more work in this area where it is so badly needed. It may weIl be that pronunciation will never again become the "Cinderella oflanguage teaching" (Kelly, 1969, p. 87), but it also needn't any longer be the neglected "orphan in English programs around the world" (Gilbert, 1994, p. 38 Indeed, Catford coined the term "threshold of intelligibility" as early as 1950 (as cited in Nelson, 1992), and Gimson (1980) speaks of "minimal general intelligibility" or the lowest requirement for efficiently conveying a message from a native speaking listener's standpoint. Yet it is not clear why Morley placed the two communicative threshold levels where she did in her index, nor what these designations entait.…”

Intelligibility after 1979

“…As English has become everybody's, or anybody's, language, so has it become associated with a corresponding multiplicity of cultural competences. ‘What is clear (or acceptable) at first reading to you may not be to me, because creating the text comes from our experiences and contexts, as it does from the writer's’ (Nelson, , p. 337). Intelligibility, comprehensibility , and interpretability segue into one another and into overall stretches of discourse.…”

Foreign Language Education at the Crossroads: Whose Model of Competence?

“…It is still the case that variations and adjustments in a non-native speaker are immediately perceived as inadequate learning. In the foreign language classroom teachers identify, correct and penalise deviations and inconsistencies according to their own native models (Nelson, 1992).…”