Noam Chomsky's distinction between 'competence' and 'performance' and the influence this has had on foreign language teaching.

 

According to Chomsky competence is the persons knowledge of the rules of his language that he uses to comprehend and establish unlimited number of well formed and correct sentences as well as discover the grammatical errors and ambiguation ,it can be seen as a prefectionist form of the language . There are several types of competence such as (Communicative Competence, Grammatical Competence, Sociolinguistic Competence, Discourse Competence, Strategic Competence, Pragmatic Competence, Literary Competence) each one of them deals with different aspect of the language .

 

On the other hand , performance is a set of particular utterance that produce by the native speakers  When we analyzing the two terms we can see the unclear and vague difference between them and this can be showing like in how the intonation and the discourse is not clearly shown in which one of them is counted , performance also contains unabstracted features such as hesitation and unfinished structures . Its believed that The main aim of linguistic is not only to understand and analyze the nature of the rules of the language but it should goes beyond that to create a wild ring of the grammar that is designed to goes deep inside the human and analyzing its unprocessed , ambiguous mechanisms . Chomsky made the idea of competence very clear by creating a group of symbols and rules to govern them and give a formal syntactic semantic and phonological structure of the sentence .

 

” Chomsky insists that if children are not born with a predisposition to acquire a language in almost the same way as they are born with the innate ability to walk, these phenomena shall never be possible.”  (Nassaji ,562:2014)

 

 

In these days , the most famous debate that languages are like an instinct comes from Noam Chomsky. He is  the linguist who first uncovered the difficulty and the complexity of the system and maybe the person most responsible for the modern revolution in language teaching .

 

Competence reflects the total knowledge of a language while performance is using whatever knowledge you have about the language to speak and write that means that performance is an indirect indicators of someone's competence ( his knowledge ) . errors in speaking maybe due to lack of knowledge ( competence ) for example irregular adverbs of verbs . sometimes errors occur due to performance issues such as : lack of attention , fatigue excitement or even being nervous so in this case , the speaker has the knowledge , he’s competent , but his performance faced some obstacles .

 

As I have mentioned, competence and performance includes “knowing” and “doing”. In recent times , a lot of  language instruction courses have payed more attention on the “knowing” (competence) part of learning a language where words and sentences are presented and practiced in a way to best help learners internalize the forms.  They assumed that once the students have ‘learned’ the information they can to use it freely through reading, writing, listening and speaking.   The  liability of this approach is that the learners will be unable to use the language in a natural way.  Having been trained to study the language through “knowing”, learners have difficulty reversing this training and actually “doing” anything with the language.   In short, it is difficult to know whether the learners’ insufficient proficiency is because of limitations of competency or a lack of performance.

 

“ However, some evidence in support of the nativist view comes from children with limited linguistic experience. In certain situations in which the child is not presented with any consistent linguistic model, they appear to have the capacity to invent some aspects of language (Carroll, 42:2005)

 

Chomsky’s theory was accepted by a lot of authors and curriculum designers that's why we see ESL books have changed  from focusing on grammar and rules to a more practical kind of learning for example : no matter how much a teacher teaches his students the rules of reading and how to detect silent letters and other irregular cases in pronunciation , it is impossible for them to apply all the rules and read freely . even if the teacher manages to teach every single rule , the students will never remember and apply them at the same time . reading correctly is something practical , if we gave a student a new word , there is a very good chance he would read it incorrectly due to the variety of irregulars . most of the natural speakers I know have learned English through practice like movies and actual conversations , grammar is concluded not learnt but having a natural English takes time while learning academic English consumes less time with limited skills .

 

Overall , Chomsky’s theory has been a target for criticism for decades but recent studies presents compelling evidence to suggest Chomsky may have been right all along. From my personal point of view , I guess Chomsky was right at some point . kids learn how to talk like learning how to walk . nobody teaches them how to stand up right , the need to walk is innate so as the need to communicate .