John Gumperz neatly summarized communicative competence in 1972: “Whereas linguistic competence covers the speaker’s ability to produce grammatically correct sentences, communicative competence describes his ability to select, from the totality of grammatically correct expressions available to him, forms which appropriately reflect the social norms governing behavior in specific encounters.”

Others (Canale and Swain: 1980) have since shaped this idea to include linguistic competence in a more overarching concept of communicative competence. In this view, communicative competence is composed of four categories: The ability to produce grammatically correct (for a particular speech community) utterances, the ability to string those utterances into discourse, the knowledge of the sociocultural rules surrounding discourse, and the verbal and nonverbal strategies used to achieve one’s intended goal in speech. Many of these things can and are taught in second language classes. Some of them however fall to the wayside.

Nonverbal communication skills are an important part of one’s overall communicative competence in a language. Indeed, as Brown points out in Chapter 9 of PLLT, “The expression of culture is so bound up in nonverbal communication that the barriers to culture learning are more nonverbal than verbal.” In my Japanese class we spend a decent amount of time learning about Japanese culture. We talk about cherry blossoms and kimono and tatami rooms. We even learn about how the Japanese tend to talk around a person place or thing by refusing to directly name it. We do not learn about things like eye contact, touching, body language, or appropriate physical distance.

Each of these could easily be taught, and would be extremely beneficial to us as learners. My grammatical competence in Japanese is ok but limited. My discourse competence is even more restricted. Although we are taught some of the sociocultural rules of discourse, Japanese has so many, and judging relationships is such a complex game that I am not confident in my skills in that area at all. Given such a quandary, it seems that knowledge of nonverbal norms of communication might be the only way to save me from certain disaster. Styles of gesture, whether and when to make eye contact, how far away I should stand in order to make the situation comfortable for my interlocutor seem to be of utmost importance when my skills in the other areas are lacking. The last thing I need when I’m stumbling over a sentence is for my audience to feel threatened because I’m standing too close, outraged because I’m making eye contact, and confused because my mouth and my body are saying two different things.

Communication is a big experience. Dell Hymes’s eight factors involved in understanding a communicative event are (the acronym SPEAKING):

Setting and Scene
Participants
Ends
Act sequence (words spoken)
Key (tone, manner, or spirit, but also body language)
Instrumentalities (style or register, written or oral, etc)
Norms of interaction and interpretation
Genre

This may not seem like a lot of things to keep track of, but when you consider that each one of these eight is actually multifaceted in itself, and that we sometimes misinterpret some of these factors in our own language and culture, it becomes an enormous undertaking to have a successful communicative event with someone outside of your native tongue and culture. Note that only three of these eight (act sequence, key, and instrumentalities) are directly related to speech. The rest are produced, sensed or intuited in other ways. This is an indicator that a large part of the communicative process has little or nothing to do with the words being spoken.

Our task as language learners therefore, is not only to “learn the language,” but to learn how to culturally interpret the setting and scene of our conversation, correctly identify the roles of the participants, be aware of social norms, and understand our own goals and the goals of our interlocutors, as well as the expected outcomes of particular types of interaction.

When I say communication is a big experience, I mean BIG. Limiting ourselves to language robs us of more than half of the picture.