The term communicative competence has been discussed in many studies in second and foreign language learning paradigm (Canale and Swain, 1983; Savignon (1997). This term can be considered as a subject of research study or a concept for the situation expected to be achieved by everyone who learns a second or foreign language.

In  terms  of   linguistics,   communicative   competence refers to language user’s grammatical knowledge of syntax, morphology, phonology and the like, as well as social knowledge about how and when to use utterances appropriately. It made a different perception between performance and competence.

In "Theoretical Bases of Communicative Approaches to Second Language Teaching and Testing" Kees de Bot (1980) Canale and Swain (1980) identified four components of communicative competence. They are grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence and strategic competence. Debate has occurred regarding linguistic competence and communicative competence in the second and foreign language teaching literature, and scholars have found communicative competence as a superior model of language.

In Indonesian context, English is determined as the first foreign language that must be learnt by Indonesian students from the age of ten or younger to the university level of formal education. So far, the criteria for determining the success or failure of learning of English have not been established. The use of national examination for each degree of education does not show the realistic mastery of English. The use communicative competence (the ability to use English for oral and written communication) as the final objective of learning English,  tools or instruments that can measure those abilities reliably and validly in a nationwide context.

This research is an attempt to formulate and design a comprehensive rationale in formulating standard of communicative competence of English for Indonesian EFL learners. The study focuses on the perceptions of teachers and students on what communicative competence means, and how they perceive each component of the communicative competence of English. Two research questions were formulated:

1. How do English teachers, non-English Language Teaching (non-ELT student), and ELT students perceive about communicative competence in English?

2. Are there any significant differences of perceptions on communicative competence in English among English teachers, non-ELT students and ELT students?

Answers to these two research questions bring impact to the quality of English teaching and learning in Indonesia. On one side, teachers in Indonesia are required to possess four basic competences: pedagogic, professional, social, and personality). These competences are tested in a package called uji kompetensi guru (teachers’ competence test), which is compulsory to every teacher in Indonesia

In terms of professional competence, the competence tested is the mastery of the subject matter being taught, in this case, English.

The mastery of English is theoretically called communicative competence in English (Canale and Swain, 1983). On the other side, English Language Teaching Students are students who study English in order to be English teachers. These students should possess the communicative competence in order to be able to master the pedagogic competence and other professional subjects.

Idenifying these teachers’ and students’ perception on communicative competence is necessary as the basis for determining steps to supervise English teachers and ELT students development in the future.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Communicative competence may have many interpretations, Chomsky’s performance and competence theory being one of them. Chomsky defends the dichotomy between what is our real ability when using the language versus what we really know about the language; that is, what we know despite the errors we make when using the language (Trask, 1999) Savignon (1997) outlines the characteristics of communicative competence as:

1. Communicative competence is a dynamic rather than a static concept that depends on the negotiation of meaning between two or more persons who share some knowledge of the language. “In this sense, then, communicative competence can be said to be an interpersonal rather than an intrapersonal trait (P 8).

2. Communicative competence should not be thought of as only an oral phenomenon. It applies to both written and spoken language.

3. Communicative competence is context-specific, in that communication always takes place in a particular context or situation. The communicatively competence language user will know how to make appropriate choices in register and style to fit the particular situation in communication occurs.

4. It is important to bear in mind the theoretical distinction between competence and performance. “Competence is what one knows. Performance is what one does. Performance is observable, and it is only through performance that competence can be developed, maintained, and evaluated”.

A more recent survey on communicative competence by Bachman divides it into three broad headings of "organizational competence," which includes both grammatical and discourse (or textual) competence, and "pragmatic competence," which includes both sociolinguistic and "illocutionary" competence. Strategic competence is associated with the interlocutors' ability in using communication strategies (Faerch and Kasper, 1983; Lin, 2010).

Through the influence of communicative language teaching, it has become widely accepted that communicative competence should be the goal of language education, central to good classroom practice. This is in contrast to previous views in which grammatical competence was commonly given top priority. The understanding of communicative competence has been influenced by the field of pragmatics and the philosophy of language concerning speech acts as described in large part by  Searle (1969) and Austin (1962).

Canale and Swain's model of communicative competence

In "Theoretical Bases of Communicative Approaches to Second Language Teaching and Testing" (Kees de Bot (1980), Michael et al. (1980) identified four components of communicative competence:

1. Grammatical competence includes knowledge of phonology, orthography, vocabulary, word formation, and sentence formation.

2. Sociolinguistic competence includes knowledge of sociocultural rules of use. It is concerned with the learners' ability to handle for example settings, topics and communicative functions in different sociolinguistic contexts. In addition, it deals with the use of appropriate grammatical forms for different communicative functions in different sociolinguistic contexts.

3. Discourse competence is related to the learners' mastery of understanding  and  producing  texts  in   the   modes   of   listening, speaking, reading and writing. It deals with cohesion and coherence in different types of texts.

4. Strategic competence refers to compensatory strategies in case of grammatical or sociolinguistic or discourse difficulties, such as the use of reference sources, grammatical and lexical paraphrase, requests for repetition, clarification, slower speech, or problems in addressing strangers when unsure of their social status or in finding the right cohesion devices. It is also concerned with such performance factors as coping with the nuisance of background noise or using gap fillers.

After Canale and Swain (1983) formulation of communicative competence, some writers have made attempts to redefine the term communicative competence in different insights and paradigms (Bálint et al., 2013; Farhady, 2005; Mohammed et al, 2009; Yano, 2003).

A major contribution to the refinement of the construct was made by Bachman, and then Bachman and Palmer in the 90s. In their approach (Bachman and Palmer, 1996), communicative competence, or to use their term, communicative language ability, consists of two broad areas: language knowledge and strategic competence.

Language knowledge has two main components – organizational and pragmatic knowledge – which complement each other. Organizational knowledge comprises knowledge of linguistic units and the rules of joining them together on the sentence and text level. Pragmatic knowledge includes illocutionary and sociolinguistic competence, where illocutionary competence concerns the knowledge of communicative action and how to carry it out, while sociolinguistic competence equals the ability to use language appropriately to the social context.

Murcia (1993) assertion of communicative by putting discourse competence as a central idea in the development of second language acquisition has been used as most important point in the development and use of competence based curriculum in Indonesia (Musthafa, 2001; Yufrizal, 2007).

This makes students and teachers in Indonesia much more familiar with terms such as ‘descriptive text, argumentative, spoof, narrative text, and so on, than they do to grammatical terms such as simple sentence, compound sentence, complex sentence, or past perfect tense.

Research design

This research is a quantitative research concentrating on finding out the perceptions of students and English teachers on communicative competence in Indonesia. The subjects consist of 31 English teachers of junior and high schools in Bandar  Lampung,  37  non English Language Teaching (non-ELT) students, and 56 English Language Teaching (ELT) Students. Fifty questions are designed to find out the teachers’ and students’ perception of communicative competence and its components. Each statement or question is supplemented by five options: strongly agree, agree, not sure, disagree and strongly disagree. The questions are arranged according to the definition of communicative competence as proposes by Canale and Swain (1983). Table 1 summarizes the content of the questionnaire. The questions are grouped into five categories:

1. Language learning definition

2. Linguistic competence

3. Sociolinguistic competence

4. Discourse competence; and

5. Strategic competence.

 

 

 

 

Analysis of the questionnaire

Fifty questions were given to 125 respondents which consist of 31 English teachers, 56 English Language Teaching students, and 38 non-ELT students. A Cronbach alpha analysis was undertaken to test the internal reliability of the questionnaire. The result of the Cronbach alpha was 0.937, which means there is a high reliability in the questionnaires (Table 2). 

 

 

Language learning definition

Five questions on the definition of language learning are prepared. The questions are:

Question 1: My students (I) learn English to (I am) enable them use the target language communicatively

Question 2: My students learn English to (I am) enable to read literature written in the target language.

Question 3: The goal of my teaching English is to enable students (me) communicate in the target language appropriately within a special social context.

Question 4: The purpose of my students learning  English is to learn how to communicate by learning to think in the target language.

Question 5: The desired outcome of my students learning English is the ability to read and understand texts written in English.

Cronbach alpha analyses of the 5 questions the subject were asked was 0.511; which means that there is a relatively low internal reliability of the questions (Table 3).

 

 

Linguistic competence

Linguistic competence covers three aspects: pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. Six questions are prepared to ask perceptions on the aspect of pronunciation, one question for vocabulary and 13 items are prepared for structure and grammar. 25 students’ and teachers’ perception and their understanding of linguistics competence was answered on questions 6 (complete questions are provided in Appendix 1 and 2 of this study). A cronbach alpha analysis was undertaken to see the internal validity of these questions. The result of the cronbach alpha was 0.801; which means that the questions have significantly high internal reliability (Table 4).

 

 

Sociolinguistic competence

Sociolinguistic competence is the ability to interpret the social meaning of the choice of linguistic varieties and to use language with the appropriate social meaning for the communication situation. This includes social functions: Interacting with other people, functions used when socializing, functions used in establishing and maintaining  relationships,  functions   involving   barriers, functions involving influencing people, functions involving feedback, functions involved in arguing, functions involving avoiding trouble, self-expressive functions, functions involving expressing opinions, functions involving expressing emotions, cognitive functions, and functions for managing conversations. Questions 26 through 35 were on students and teachers perceptions on their understanding of sociolinguistic competence. The Cronbach Alpha analysis was 0.836, which shows that there is a significantly high internal reliability of these questions (Table 5).

 

 

Discourse competence

Discourse competence is used to refer to two related, but distinct abilities. Textual discourse competence refers to the ability to understand and construct monologues or written texts of different genres. Discourse competence could also refer to the ability to participate effectively in conversations. This includes narratives, procedural texts, expository texts, persuasive (hortatory) texts, descriptions and others. These discourse genres have different characteristics, but in each genre there are some elements that help make the text coherent and other elements which are used to make important points distinctive or prominent. Questions 36 through 47 were on students’ and teachers’ perceptions of their understanding of competence. The Cronbach Alpha analysis was 0.905; which shows that there is a significantly high internal reliability of these questions (Table 6).

 

 

Strategic competence

This  is  about  knowing  how  to   recognize   and   repair communication breakdown, how to work around gaps in one’ knowledge of the language, and how to learn more about the language in the context. This includes paraphrasing, appeal for assistance, coinage, mime, gesture, filling gaps. Three questions (questions 48 through 50) were on the teachers’ and students’ perceptions on their understanding of this competence. The Cronbach Alpha analysis was 0.801, which shows that there is a significantly high internal reliability of these questions (Table 7).

 

 

Statistical analyses of teachers’ and students’ perseptions on communicative competence

A statistical analyses to find out whether students and teachers differ or are similar on the aspect of communicative comepetence was executed using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The steps in doing this is analysis are firstly, the questions were grouped into categories. For instance, questions 1 to 5 were grouped into definition category, because these questions asked mainly about the definition ofcommunicative competence. Questions 6 through 25 were grouped into linguistic comeptence category, and so on. Thus, in this case, there are five categories of questions that were asked to the respondents. The question category are: definition, linguistic competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse, competence, and strategic competence. Table 8 shows the descriptive statistic of the categories. The result of ANOVA calculation on the perceptions of students and teachers are presented in Table 9. 

 

 

 

Table 9 shows  that in terms of definition of communicative competence, the result of ANOVA for F count was 0.385, which is higher than the p< 0.05. This means that teachers and students do not differ significantly in their understanding of communicative competence. All respondents seem to agree that the purpose of learning is for communicative purpose.

In terms of perception on linguistic competence, the ANOVA resulted in F value of 10.552 (p< 0.05) is lower than the F table. This means that teachers and students differ significantly in their perceptions of linguistic competence. Figure 1 show that ELT students perceive they understand English linguistic well, teachers believe their students know linguistic competence, and non ELT students are not confident whether they understand Englsh linguistic.

 

 

In terms of sociolinguistic competence, The ANOVA resulted in p<0.05. This means that teachers and students differ significantly in their perceptions of sociolinguistic competence. Figure 2 shows that teachers believe their students are able to use the functions of sociolinguistics. ELT students believe they know the sociolinguistics aspect of English, but non-ELT students are not confidence on their sociolinguistic competence.

 

 

In terms of discourse competence, the ANOVA resulted in F value of 15.881 which is higher than the F table. This means that teachers and students differ significantly in their perceptions of discourse competence. Figure 3 shows that teachers believe their students are able to use the functions of sociolinguistics. ELT students believe they know the sociolinguistics aspect of English, but non-ELT students are not confidence on their discourse competence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are some interesting findings that  can  be  found from the exposition of the data. Findings are discussed in terms of the 2013 curriculum of English syllabuses, some agreeing points between teachers and students, and some mismatch between students’ and teachers’ responses on the aspects of communicative competence.

Agreeing responses

Teachers and students agreed on some items asked in the questionnaire. Among the agreement between the students and the teachers is defining the purposes of teaching and learning English.

In five questions asked, students and teachers seem to agree with the point that the purpose of learning English is to develop students’ ability in communicating the target language. Some other points that the teachers and students seem to agree on is the understanding of text type (genre).

Agreeing can happen not only on the positive responses to the statements but also on the negative responses to the statements asked. For example, in question 6, the questionnaire states: My students are able to distinguish English vowel  and  diphthong  sounds pronounced by native speakers, both teachers and students responded negatively. The percentage of disagreeing by the students and the teachers reaches more than fifty percent. Likewise in the statement ‘My students are able to pronounce English sentences in accurate stress and intonation’, the disagreement responded by the teachers reach almost 70% of the responses, and the same proportion can be found in the students’ responses.

This also happens in the responses to questions no.12: My students are able to master all types of English words including content and function words’, both students and teachers disagree with the statement in the proportion of more than 60%. Positive agreement can be found in the responses to questions concerning sociolinguistics function. Both students and teachers put strong agreement on the knowledge of the sociolinguistic function in questions 25 to 33.

The disagreeing responses

Some mismatch can be found particularly on the aspect of  linguistic  competence.  The  facts  are  found   in   the incongruence between the teachers’ responses and the student responses.

1. In question 25 states: ‘My students are able to understand rules of word and sentence formations or structural skills of causatives, use of wish’ when students respond positively (about 70%) to the statement, teachers responded negatively to the statement.

2. In statement 22, the statement says: My students are able to understand rules of word and sentence formations or structural skills of affixes and derivatives’ 93.3% of the teachers who responded negatively; while 60% of students responded positively to the statement.

3. In question no.16, the questionnaire states: My students are able to understand the rules of noun phrases and constructing and presenting description texts which describe objects, using noun phrases. About 80% of the teachers disagree with the statement, while 70% of students agree with the statement.

In terms of communicative competence definition, all subjects seem to agree that the main objective of learning English as a foreign language is to enable them to communicate in the target language. They also seem to agree that the ability to communicate in the target language does not necessarily mean to have the ability like the native speakers of the language.

In terms of linguistic competence which consists of phonological, structural/grammar competence, and vocabulary competence, subjects seem to have different opinion. For the question which state the ability to listen to the native speaker, high percentage of teacher are not confident whether their student are able to do it. For the students, more than fifty percent are not confident.

However, when asked whether the students are able to pronounce the English sound, more than fifty percent of the students agree to the statement. In general, for phonological aspect, students are confident that they have the ability both in understanding the sound pronounced by native speaker as well as to pronounce the sounds. Teachers in this study are more pessimistic. They are not sure if the students have the capability of comprehending the English sounds or produce them appropriately.

For vocabulary aspect, subjects of this study seem to agree the mastery of English vocabulary is difficult. Students are not sure whether they have mastered the English vocabulary appropriately or not. Likewise, teachers also feel unsure if the students have mastered the English vocabulary sufficiently.

The grammatical aspects comprise both teachers and students negative answers to the questions. In answering whether the students are able to compose simple and complex sentences, students and teachers agree they are able to do it. Students feel they know the structural rules of noun phrases, adjective phrase, and passive and active forms of the language, but teachers are pessimistic about it, sociolinguistic aspect comprises all subjects  that are confident they are able to do it. Students and teachers believe that they are able to accomplish all kinds of language function: greeting, leave taking, apologizing, feeling sorry, and so on.

English teachers, non ELT students, and ELT students perceived communicative competences differently. There are some agreements in the responses by both students and teachers on the aspects of communicative competence. There is also some mismatch between the responses of the teachers and students on aspects of communicative competence.

There is a tendency that students and teachers agree that English is learned in order to be able to communicate with the language. They also seem to agree that the ability to communicate in the target language does not necessarily mean they have the ability to like the native speakers of the language.

The grammatical aspect consists of both teachers and students negative answers to the questions. In answering whether the students are able to compose simple and complex sentences, students and teachers agree they are able to do it. Students feel they know the structural rules of noun phrases, adjective phrases, and passive and active forms of the language, but teachers are pessimistic about their students understanding those concepts. Sociolinguistic aspect is the aspect that all subjects confident they are able to do. Students and teachers believe that they are able to accomplish all kinds of language function: greeting, leave taking, apologizing, feeling sorry, and so on.

One of the implications of these findings might be a reformulation of the objectives of teaching and learning English in Indonesia. If discourse competence as the central point for the teaching of the Language is continued, students might be able to discuss the form and function of texts; although they may not be able to identify basic components of the language.

A further analysis on this matter will be needed in order to come up with a better formulation of the teaching practices which are theoretically and practically beneficial to both students and teachers.

The authors have not declared any conflict of interests.