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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