I've been following this debate from the sidelines, partly because it sounds too much like too many arguments about ideology or religion and partly because I'm not entirely sure of my own position on competence and performance, what they define, and what their relevance is to pedagogy.  Craig, Bill, and Bob have carried on a thoughtful and stimulating discussion on these matters that I have enjoyed and that I appreciate for the thought, expertise, and passion that has gone into it.



When I was in grad school in the late 60s, one piece of required reading in syntax classes was Paul Postal's Constituent Structure, a stern polemic against all non-generative theories of grammar.  Postal's rhetorical technique was to restate a particular model, Pike's Tagmemics or Lamb's Stratificational Grammar or any of several others, strictly in the terms of the then current transformational-generative model.  Stated in those terms, of course, the other models lost a good bit of their subtlety, and anything they had to offer that could not be stated in terms of Postal's model was simply left out.  The fact, for example, that tagmemics grew out of and encoded some of the most powerful heuristics ever developed for linguistic field work and analysis was not to be valued.  Collecting and classifying data was not what linguistics was about.



I don't want to suggest that anyone is doing in this discussion what Postal did in his book, certainly not in the same brutal tone, but the treatment of competence and performance reflects of similar tendency to define others' positions in terms of one's own.  Generative linguistics, for want of a better term, uses its competence/performance distinction as a theoretical prime allowing a clear partitioning of linguistic data into that which represents native speaker competence and that which reflects behavioral and social interference with the production and comprehension of sentences so that sentences may be produced or interpreted in ways that competence would not allow. Competence gets operationalized in reliance on native speaker intuition as primary data.  There are good reasons for doing linguistics this way.  One of the traps that extreme pre-generative structuralists fell into was treating all native speaker production as grist for linguistic description, with no judgment of grammaticality.  The reliance on native speaker competence provided a reasonably principled way to partition data into what the grammar should deal with and what should be left to behavior and social scientists.



Competence has a hard time, however, in dealing with subjects like a native speaker's sense of degree of variation.  One of the early findings in Labov's work and that of his students was that members of a speech community could tell where a person fit in that community of the basis of frequency of use of certain linguistic markers, whether final consonant deletion, copula deletion, or, in Canadian French, deletion of que.  The ability to distinguish and control ranges of variation were part of the speaker's knowledge of his or her language.  Labov proposed variable rules to account for this, but the generative model never became comfortable with such variation, and variable rules rarely make it into generative accounts of linguistic phenomena.



While most linguists, whatever their theoretical orientation, recognize that there are things that native speakers know and things that they do that don't conform to this knowledge, not all theories find that distinguishing these as competence and performance has much yield for doing linguistics.  When Bob suggests that functionalists, which I think he acknowledges is too broad a category to be useful, deal only with performance or ignore competence or can't distinguish properly between them, he imposes his competence/ performance distinction on the discourse of the broader field.  This is where I find Bob's argumentation similar to Postal's:  he recasts other theories in the terms and categories of his own.  The phenomena, like native speaker judgment, that the distinction helps him to define are addressed by other theories as well but not with the same sort of categorization.



It has to be possible to use more neutral terms, like native speaker knowledge perhaps and recognize that some part of this is what generative grammar calls competence but that it might not be useful in another model to categorize native speaker knowledge in just this way.



I haven't discussed any data or specific examples in this bit of rhetorical analysis because I'm attempting a sort of metadiscussion of the conversation that's been going on, not always a satisfying thing for a linguist to do who loves data-mongering.



Herb

-----Original Message-

From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Robert Yates

Sent: 2009-02-24 16:14

To: [log in to unmask]

Subject: Re: On the importance of the competence-performance distinction for language teachers



Bill and Craig,



Thank you both for your thoughtful replies to my post on the importance

of the competence-performance for language teachers.



I used sentence (1),  a real sentence written by an L1 Chinese student

I'm teaching this semester.



1) They are not agree with the Input Hypothesis.



I proposed that the error in (1) is not with "are" but the student's

underlying representation of the work "agree."  The student told be for

her  "agree" is an adjective.  Among other things, I noted correcting

"are" and replacing with "do" would not really help this student because

such a correction does not provide her with the explanation why the

"are" is incorrect here.



Craig noted:

 It's  certainly good to be reminded that merely correcting the surface

errors on a text isn't good pedagogical practice. I'm not sure

"competence" and  "performance" are the best terms to account for a

connection between what a student does and what he/she understands, but

it all makes sense. 



***

Of course, he is right.  In this case the "surface error" -- "are"

should be "do" is not correct.  I wish he had provided his understanding

of why the student wrote (1) in the first place.



In this regard, Bill's response is more interesting.  I wish he had

written more.



Bill notes correctly with the competence/performance distinction. 



>>> "Spruiell, William C" <[log in to unmask]> 2/23/2009 12:56 PM >>>



If you're claiming that only a competence/performance-distinguishing

model can deal with those phenomena, you're wrong. If you're claiming

that we can deal with them only by talking about what speakers seem to

think/assume/believe about a language -- i.e., that we have to make some

statements about internal states if we're making other than purely

descriptive statements -- you're right. But *lots* of theories,

including most functionalist ones, are in the same camp you are on that

one.



****

He is, of course, right that other theories posit internal states  that

are the result of input and not the result of some innate knowledge of

principles of language.  I tried to address such an alternative

explanation in my original post.  I want to consider the alternative

account that Bill provides:



I should probably clarify my comments a bit. You'll notice toward the

end of that earlier post, I throw in the following:



>>I think functionalists in general don’t mind claiming that

performance 

>>(including comprehension in a social context, rather than just 

>>production) partly creates competence as an epiphenomenon...<<



The "partly" was there by intention, as was the entailment that

competence exists (you can't create something that is

nonexistent....well, barring certain interpretations of null-elements).

Obviously, native speakers do have the ability to recognize if novel

strings are acceptable in their language or not. Production and

comprehension appear to conform to certain norms, and it's hard to deal

with that without positing some kind of "rest state" system (not

impossible, since I *think* Eco's semiotics manages it, but I'm by no

means positive). Functionalists tend to think the fundamental

characteristics of that system are determined by general cognitive

constraints together with *meaningful* interaction with other speakers,

rather than by the operation of a specific-only-to-language module on a

semantically neutral set of input strings. If for "competence" we

substitute "how one expects the language to act, given what's gone

before," we've got something closer to the functionalist conception (or

at least, my version of it).

***



I want to consider Bill's functionalist explanation for how we come to

what we know about language and what that means for BOTH the student and

the teacher's knowledge of the language.



If "meaningful" interaction and general cognitive constraints are what

determines what we know about language , we have to be puzzled why any

student would write (1).  We can be pretty confident that a student in

the States would never encounter such a sentence like (1) with just

"agree."  As I noted in my original post, (2) and (3) are possible.



(2) They are not agreeing with the Input Hypothesis.

(3) They are not in agreement with the Input Hypothesis.



Because, I think, a functionalist explanation tries to avoid abstract

representations, my explanation of why the student wrote (1) -- agree is

an adjective - is not a possible functionalist explanation.  I'm not a

functionalists, so here is my question: What are the general cognitive

constraints operating in "meaningful interaction," that resulted in this

student concluding agree is an adjective?  I wish I could read a

plausible functionalist account. 



Now let's consider the teacher's response to (1) from the functionalist

explanation.  As native speakers we are confronted with a sentence we

have never encountered before in any meaningful interaction.  Although

we understand it, we recognize it is ungrammatical because ARE should be

DO. So, we cross out ARE and write DO.  If the only thing we know about

language is through meaningful interaction and general cognitive

constraints, how do we even suppose that (1) is the result of the writer

having the wrong category for "agree."   Those categories are merely the

result of an epiphenomona of the frequencies we have unconsciously noted

in the language.  As a teacher considering this string and whose

knowledge of English is the result of interactions, we also realize that

(1) is just as likely the result of the student meaning to write (2) and

(3).  We now have to decide how many possibilities we put on the

student's paper to indicate why (1) is not English.  Again, I'm not a

functionalist, so I feel very uncomfortable providing explanations for a

perspective I don't know very well.  I want to be corrected if I have

misstated anything.



I am a language teacher; I teach both native and non-native speakers of

English and I teach about the nature of language to pre-service teachers

who will be teaching both native and non-native speakers.   I have to

respond to texts that contain strings that no mature writer would write.

 I have tried to show here how the assumption that our knowledge of

language (both mine as a teacher and that of my students) has both a

competence  and performance distinction informs my responses.



I suspect that those who deny the competence-performance distinction

respond to texts differently.  I'm trying to figure what the differences

are to evaluate which view of language is more helpful to me as a 

teacher.



Bob Yates, University of Central Missouri   



 



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