COMPETENCE AND PERFORMANCE
Competence is the ability to
produce an unlimited number of sentences with the knowledge of limited number
of grammatical rules. Competence consists of the knowledge of language user in
principle has. Performance is imperfect manifestation of competence.
Performance is the result of the psychological process that employs this
knowledge in producing or interpreting language utterance. Chomsky separates competence and performance; he
describes 'competence' as an idealized capacity that is located as a
psychological or mental property or function and ‘performance’ as the
production of actual utterances. In short, competence involves
“knowing” the language and performance involves “doing” something with the
language. The difficulty with this construct is that it is very difficult to
assess competence without assessing performance.
Noting
the distinction between competence and performance is useful primarily because
it allows those studying a language to differentiate between a speech error and
not knowing something about the language. To understand this distinction, it is
helpful to think about a time when you've made some sort of error in your
speech. For example, let's say you are a native speaker of English and utter the
following:
Is
this error due to competence or performance? It is most likely that as a
native speaker you are aware how to use irregular verbs in
the past but your performance has let you down this time. Linguists
use the distinction between competence and performance to illustrate the
intuitive difference between accidentally saying maked and the fact
that a child or speaker of English may not know that the past tense of make is made and say maked consistently.
As we have learned, competence
and performance involve “knowing” and “doing”. In the recent past, many
language instruction programs have focused more on the “knowing” (competence)
part of learning a language wherein words and sentences are presented and
practiced in a way to best help learners internalize the forms. The
assumption here is that once the learners have ‘learned’ the information they
will be able to use it through reading, writing, listening and
speaking. The disadvantage of this approach is that the learners
are unable to use the language in a natural way. Having been trained to
learn the language through “knowing”, learners have difficulty reversing this
training and “doing” something with the language. In brief, it is
difficult to assess whether the learners’ insufficient proficiency is due to
limitations of competency or a lack of performance. In order to focus learners
more on the “doing” part of learning, which allows a more accurate measure of
learners’ language proficiency, a more communicative approach to teaching can
be used. This type of approach concentrates on getting learners to do
things with the language. So, it is about getting the language and using it. If the students are
encouraged to “learn trough the language”, learning the language will be more
balanced focus on competence and performance.
IMMITATION
Children are good imitators and
they learn by imitating and always repeating what they hear. Children also
learn the language through habit formation. As far as we were concerned,
imitation in child language learning related to behaviourist theory of
learning. It purposes that all language learning is the result of habit
formation by a reinforcement of successful behaviour. Children imitate the
language behaviour of their parents and other member of social group. If
learning is the result of imitation and habit formation, so that teacher should
get good example and learning. Behaviourist claims that human are born a set of
instinctive responses to external stimuli. Imitation of any kind involves a
relation between motor perceptual functioning, between the motor system of the
brain and visual and other sensory system. Imitation plays in the origin of
language, in the acquisition of language by children, in the historical
development of language. There are separate sub-questions about imitation in
relation to phonology, lexicon and syntax. Trevarthen (1984,1994) stated that
infants learn by imitation but structural foundations for imitative movements
must be innate, some infants display remarkable precion in imitation from birth
but there are large individual references, around six months an infant can be
observed imitating signal gestures and mannerisms which have the
characteristics of protosigns in proto-conversation, with a shared grammar of
action.
In
a general observation,
the children are good
imitators. We regard
children as typical imitators, and then conclude
that imitation is
one of the important strategies
that are used by child in second language acquisition. This conclusion is generally believed. In fact, research
have shown that to imitate repeatedly is the
important strategy in language learning and it is an important aspect of
mastering phonological in early age.
By Group 8:
SARNIATI NURU P0600213010
ARDHY SUPRABA P0600213404
SATRIAWATY P0600213410
ASBAR P0600213436
NIRWATI P0600213447
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