knowledge of language and ability for use

Knowledge of Language and Ability for Use H. G. WIDDOWSON University of London This paper seeks to clarify the notion of competence in language and to draw on its relevance to language teaching practices. It is suggested that Hymes's account of communicative competence as incorporating language beyond grammar and ability as well as knowledge raises problematic issues concerning the analysability and accessibility of knowledge and the scope and application of linguistic rules. A consideration of these issues suggests the possibility that competence for use may involve not so much the generation of expressions by direct reference to rules as the adjustment of pre-assembled and memorized patterns. The ability to use language, therefore, may have to do with access which is relatively independent of the analytic knowledge of grammar as defined in Chomsky's original concept of competence. The influence of ideas, whether for good or ill, does not depend upon their being fully understood in their own terms. Usually, indeed, it depends upon them being recast in different terms to suit other conditions of relevance. This should not be a matter of surprise or regret. The more influential an idea, the less dependent it is, obviously enough, on the particular context of its conception. All interpretation, after all, is a matter of reformulating ideas so that they key in with one's own frame of reference. And so it is with the idea of communicative competence. It has been adapted, interpreted, and exploited, keyed in with the concerns of applied linguistics and language teaching pedagogy. It has inspired a good deal of innovative activity in the field. Some of this comes from partial understanding of the concept, from a distortion indeed of the original. This does not matter. Many a new dish has emerged from a mistake with a recipe. We do not condemn this; we call it being creative. But as with other influential ideas, it is sometimes enlightening to renew acquaintance with the primary textual source and scrutinize it for meanings which we might have missed or misinterpreted and which we might find of relevance to our current concerns. I believe that there are matters arising from Hymes's original formulation of the notion of communicative competence that have a bearing on a number of issues which have emerged over recent years in research in second language acquisition and in the design of language programmes. It is the purpose of this paper to explore these matters. As I was in the process of composing this paper, I discovered, rather to my chagrin, that its purpose had in part been anticipated by an article by David Taylor in the most recent issue of Applied Linguistics (Taylor 1988) which examines the concept of competence with impressive perception. Other Applied Linguistics, Vol. 10, No. 2 © Oxford University Press 1989 H. G. WIDDOWSON 129 scholars too have had things to say on the issues I raise here, as will be clear from my references. So this paper will be full of other men's flo\.~ s (and other women's too, I should add). 'Only the string that binds them is my own.' We can begin with the authorized version that every student is schooled in. Hymes proposed his concept of communicative competence in reaction to Chomsky, and it is customary to present it as an improvement in that it covers aspects of language other than the narrowly grammatical. It accounts for the fact that knowing how to use a language involves more than knowing how to compose correct sentences. 'There are rules of use... ' etc.: a familiar quotation. But it needs to be recognized that the two concepts are (as Feyerabend would note) not really commensurate. Chomsky and Hymes are playing in different kinds of game. It is true that there are rules of use, etc., but then Chomsky does not deny it. It is simply that he is not interested in language use. Indeed he is not really interested in language as such at all. He is interested in grammar. As far as he is concerned, as he himself says 'language is a derivative and perhaps not a very interesting concept' (Chomsky 1980: 90). Other linguists, inspired by Chomsky's example, have, of course, taken the same line. In his inaugural lecture at University College London, for example, Neil Smith tells us: 'Linguistics is not about language, or languages, at least that is not its main focus, it is about grammars' (Smith 1983: 4). The point then is that for Hymes linguistics is about language and for Chomsky it is not. So Chomsky's notion of competence has nothing whatever to do with the actualization of language behaviour, communicative or otherwise. So really it does not fit into Hymes's scheme at all. For Chomsky, competence is the knowledge of something much more abstract than language: it is a knowledge of systems of rules, of parameters or principles, configurations in the mind for which language simply serves as evidence. How these mental abstractions are realized in actual instances of language use, or how they are related to other aspects of language or to other kinds of abstract knowledge are matters entirely beyond the scope of his enquiry. He invokes the notion of modularity, and leaves it at that. For Chomsky, then, competence is grammatical knowledge as a deep-seated mental state below the level of language. It is not an ability to do anything. It is not even the ability to compose or comprehend sentences, for knowledge may exist without its being accessible and, as Chomsky insists, actual behaviour is only one kind of evidence, and not a criterion for the existence of knowledge (Chomsky 1980: 54). For Hymes, on the other hand, competence is the ability to do something: to use language. For him, grammatical knowledge is a resource, not an abstract cognitive configuration existing in its own right as a mental structure. How such knowledge gets realized as use is therefore a central issue, and it is necessarily a component of communicative competence. Hymes's communicative competence, then, is defined as 'the capabilities of a person' and, as he says, 'it is dependent upon both [tacit] knowledge and [ability for] use' (Hymes 1972: 282). What Chomsky takes such care to eliminate from his definition, Hymes reinstates. Having identified his four parameters of 130 KNOWLEDGE OF LANGUAGE communicative competence (possibility, feasibility, appropriateness, and attestedness in actual performance), Hymes observes: Knowledge also is to be understood as subtending all four parameters of communica- tion just noted. There is knowledge of each. Ability for use also may relate to all four parameters. Certainly, it may be the case that individuals differ with regard to ability to use knowledge of each: to interpret, differentiate, etc. The specification of ability for use as part of competence allows for the role of non-cognitive factors, such as motivations, as partly determining competence. (Hymes 1972: 282-3) There are, then, two aspects to competence in respect to each of the four parameters: knowledge on the one hand, and ability on the other. Hymes thus extends the Chomsky concept of competence in two ways. He includes knowledge of aspects of language other than grammar—of what is feasible, appropriate, actually performed. And he includes ability for use. There are therefore eight elements to the model where Chomsky only has two. So, in principle, we ought to be able to say what constitutes a knowledge of feasibility, for example, as distinct from an ability to be feasible; what constitutes knowledge of appropriateness conventions, as distinct from an ability to be appropriate, and so on. I have no idea how one would set about doing this, and Hymes gives us little indication. The problem, as always with models which simply provide a list of features (if indeed these can be called models at all), is that it is difficult to know what the relations between the features might be. I will not attempt a systematic exploration of all the relational possibilities in this paper but shall concentrate on one or two, and in particular on the relationship between knowledge and ability. This alone will give us plenty to think about. For the distinction, and the problem of the relationship between the two concepts, appear in various guises in work in applied linguistics and language pedagogy over recent years. Consider first the question: is it possible for somebody to have knowledge in respect of what Hymes calls possibility, that is to say of the formal properties of a language, and fail to have ability in respect of appropriateness? We might expect a resounding 'yes' to come from the proponents of the communicative approach to language teaching. For it would seem, on the face of it, that it was because so many learners seemed to be in precisely this state as a result of structure-based teaching that the communicative approach was proposed in the first place: learners full of knowledge that they apparently did not have the ability to put to effective, that is to say, appropriate use? And it would appear that Chomsky too envisages just such a state of affairs, or (to be more exact), state of mind: 'I assume' [he says] 'that it is possible in principle for a person to have full grammatical competence and no pragmatic competence, hence no ability to use a language appropriately, though its syntax and semantics are intact' (Chomsky 1980: 59). But there is a confusion here. We should notice, to begin with, that Chomsky is inconsistent in his use of terms. For by grammatical competence he means a kind of knowledge, but it is evident that by pragmatic competence he means a kind of ability. He does not, as Hymes does, conceive of a knowledge of appropriateness, nor indeed for that matter of a grammatical H.G.WTODOWSON 131 ability. So we might now raise the question: is it possible, in principle, to have grammatical ability without pragmatic ability; that is to say, can we conceive of people who can, in Hymes's terms, process language along the possibility parameter without regard to appropriate use? The answer here would again seem to be 'yes', and now we return to the supposed shortcomings of the pre- communicarive paradigm in language teaching. For on reflection it is really this state of affairs which the communicative approach sought to rectify. It was not that learners who suffered under the structuralist regime were full of knowledge which had no behavioural output. There was plenty of output, but it was not of a pragmatically approved kind. The classrooms were full of activity for the achievement of grammatical ability. The trouble was that it was often carried out in dissociation from any consideration of appropriateness. In other words, to use my own terminology, what was promoted was the ability to manifest language as usage rather than to realize it as use. What then, about the reverse situation? Can we have pragmatic ability, an ability to use language appropriately, without grammatical knowledge or the ability to compose or decompose sentences with reference to it? There is evidence that excessive zeal for communicative language teaching can lead to just such a state of affairs. Learners can acquire a repertoire of phrases for deployment in a range of correlating contexts but fail to analyse them fully into constituents as linguistic structures. Grammatical competence is not necessarily inferred from use, and so use is itself constricted. For, as Bialystok observes, 'The assumption is that if knowledge is analysed, then certain uses can be made of that knowledge which cannot be made of knowledge that is unanalysed' (Bialystok 1982:183). So the learner might acquire a repertoire of phrases with contextual associations, chunks, so to speak, which have not been analysed into grammatical knowledge. One might indeed suggest that the very focusing on the relationship between linguistic expressions and external context inhibits the process of establishing internal relationships of linguistic expressions with each other. We are, of course, talking of tendencies. Some grammar is likely to be contin- gently analysed out of communicative activity just as there will be some pragmatic side-effects from a concentration on analysis by focusing on form. It is a matter of degree. Nevertheless, we seem to have something of a paradox here. If we assume with Bialystok that the analysis of language into grammatical elements allows for the flexible adaptability of the language to a range of different uses, then it would be reasonable to conclude that an approach to teaching which induces such analysis, the structural approach indeed, is more communicative, in its potential effect at least, than an approach which deflects attention away from analysis and which links holistic expressions with a fixed range of contexts. In other words, if the ability to use linguistic knowledge effectively for communication depends on the extent to which that knowledge is analysed, then the structural approach would seem to provide the basis for the development of communicative competence in a way which the communicative approach, at least in some of its manifestations, does not. 132 KNOWLEDGE OF LANGUAGE But of course, as Chomsky makes clear, knowledge, analysed or not, needs to be accessed. It may be the case that the more analysed language is, the more potentially generalizable it is across a range of uses, but the potential has to be realized. Bialystok recognizes this. She refers to the factor of automaticity, 'the relative access the learner has to the knowledge, irrespective of its degree of analysis' (Bialystok 1982:183). In a subsequent paper, written with Sharwood- Smith, language ability is said to involve 'knowledge systems on the one hand, and control of these systems on the other' (Bialystok and Sharwood-Smith 1985: 106). So, to summarize the story so far, and to get the terms straight, we seem to have the following positions. For Chomsky, competence is knowledge. For Hymes, competence is knowledge and ability. For Bialystok and Sharwood- Smith ability is knowledge and control. Since it is clear that Bialystok and Sharwood-Smith are restating the Hymes distinction in different terms, let us regularize the terminology by saying that competence has two components: knowledge and ability, and that these in principle relate to all four of Hymes's parameters (possibility, feasibility, appropriateness, performance) which in turn can be reformulated as grammatical competence (the parameter of possibility) on the one hand, and pragmatic competence (all the other parameters) on the other. Knowledge can be characterized in terms of degrees of analysability, ability can be characterized in terms of degrees of accessibility. We might now hazard the generality that the structural approach accounts for one aspect of competence by concentrating on analysis but does so at the expense of access, whereas the communicative approach concentrates on access to the relative neglect of analysis. These concepts then enable us to make a general character- ization of different pedagogic practices. So far so good. But it would be as well to look at these concepts a little more closely. Consider first the concept of analysability. One can discuss this in reference to the interlanguage of the learner and talk about the extent to which the language data have been reduced to rule as required, thinking of competence essentially, as Chomsky and Hymes both do, as the knowledge of abstract systems. But the question arises as to how far knowledge of language is systematic and circumscribed by rule in that way. Grammar of course is, by definition. But there is a great deal that the native speaker knows of his language which takes the form less of analysed grammatical rules than adaptable lexical chunks. Pawley and Syder refer to these as 'lexicalised sentence stems' and suggest that 'the stock [of them] known to the ordinary mature speaker of English amounts to hundreds of thousands'(Pawley and Syder 1983:192). This stock is, then, a not inconsiderable component of competence. It cannot just be dismissed as somehow incidental. Apart from anything else, there is evidence that these holophrastic expressions figure prominently in first language development (Peters 1983) and indeed might be regarded as the primary units of child acquisition, with rules emerging as a function of gradual and differential focusing, as the child detaches the language from its direct contextual connec- tions and generalizes features of context into grammar. H. G. W1DDOWSON 133 These lexicalized sentence stems are of course subject to differing degrees of syntactic modification. At one end of the spectrum, we have fixed phrases that cannot be dismantled, compound lexical items in suspended syntactic anima- tion. Knowledge of these, like so much lexical knowledge, is a matter of memory. At the other end of the spectrum we have collocational clusters which can be freely adjusted as sentence constituents. So we have a scale of variability in the legitimate application of generative rules. And competence must be a matter of knowing how the scale is to be applied; when analysis is called for and when it is not. Pawley and Syder, who discuss this issue in some detail, point out that 'native speakers do not exercise the creative potential of syntactic rules to anything like their full extent, and . . . indeed if they did so they would not be accepted as exhibiting nativelike control of the language' (Pawley and Syder 1983: 193). But notice the control that is referred to here is not the same as that which Bialystok and Sharwood-Smith talk about. It is not a matter of inadequate access to knowledge in the exercise of the ability to use language, but inadequate knowledge of the internal operation of language itself. The over-application of grammatical rules in English, for example to yield goed instead of went, or He explained me the problem instead of He explained the problem to me is recognized as being in need of remedy. But just the same principle applies with expressions like, for example, Before you leap, look, All that has ended well is well, By hook or crook, and so on. The difference of course is that these latter examples are grammatical, the former ones are not. But they are still not English in respect of native speaker norms. And anybody producing these syntactic variants of fixed idiomatic phrases would nevertheless be adjudged incompe- tent in the language. An ignorance of the limits of analysability, of the variable application of grammatical rules, constitutes incompetence. One might suggest this aspect of incompetence is covered by the Hymes parameter of performance: expressions that come from an over-application of rules are grammatical but uncommon. 'A sentence', says Hymes, 'may be grammatical, awkward, tactful and rare' (Hymes 1972:281-2). But what I am saying is that such expressions are not just rare, by accident as it were, but are illegitimate, rule-violations, not possible, and the native speaker knows this full well. Such sentences as manifestations of knowledge, as instances of usage (to use a term of my own), are grammatical and yet linguistically ill-formed. Linguistically ill-formed, notice. This is not a judgement about acceptability. I am talking about linguistic well-formedness and I am claiming that this notion applies to the variably analysed formal properties of a language which are not just syntactic but lexical as well, and indeterminate between the two, properties which are holistically remembered as well as those which are analytically reduced to rule. I have been talking about variability in rule application and of course Labov comes to mind. He had demonstrated how internal linguistic environments of a morphological kind condition the appearance of particular phonological variants (Labov 1972). All I am saying is that similarly there are