2.4.2. Global communicative competence

With native speakers, the level of communicative competence can be described as global communicative competence (GCC). Global communicative competence is the ability to co-ordinate the interaction of separate components of communicative competence so as to supply efficiency in communication, i.e. a person’s verbal abilities. The components’ interrelation can be schematically presented as follows:

f acts, ideas, etc. utterances, texts, etc.

strategic

competence

lingua-cultu- social-

ral compe- linguistic

tence competence

language discourse illocution

competence competence competence

t he degree of the degree of

certainty uncertainty

The main condition of effective communication is the sufficient global communicative competence of the interlocutors. The GCC is composed of language (linguistic) competence, which is supported with the following competences as additional components:

• the ability to cope separate sentences into a coherent oral or written utterance, discourse. For this purpose various syntactic and semantic means of cohesion are used (discourse competence);

• the ability to express and comprehend word combinations and sentences in such a form and such a meaning that are appropriate with a given social-linguistic context of communicative illocution act (social-linguistic competence);

• the ability to participate in communication effectively, choosing the correct strategy of discourse, if communication may be broken because of noise, inefficient competence, etc. The choice of the right strategy for the increase of communication effectiveness is also included in this ability (strategic competence);

• the ability to form illocution (speech) acts appropriately according to the context (situation) of communication, i.e. to invite, to inform somebody, to ask somebody for something (illocution competence);

• the ability to take into account peculiarities of a target language community, its culture and history, etc. in illocution acts of communication with native speakers (lingua-cultural competence). Lingua-cultural competence may well include words and expressions that denote things, phenomena, facts and ideas, which either do not exist in the mother tongue, or are called differently. E.g.: hot dog, foreign secretary and the like.

The global communicative competence is not a simple sum total of its components but a result of permanently changing influence caused by other kinds of competence. J. Oller and L. Bachman have experimentally proved its existence as a separate kind of competence. The global communicative competence proves to be common for both the mother tongue and a foreign language. It is apparently exceeded by a person’s general intellect.

Thus, global communicative competence is the ability to perform communicative activity realising the communicative verbal behaviour on the basis of phonological, lexical-grammatical, social-linguistic and lingua-cultural knowledge and habits and with the help of skills of discourse, illocution and strategic kinds of competence in accordance with various objectives and communicative situations (I.A. Zimnyaya).

In other words, the GCC is the ability to use language appropriately in various socially determined situations (N.I.Gez).