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:
