ARHIVELE OLTENIEI - Universitatea din Craiova

Different pedagogic perspectives in teaching spanish as a foreign language 185message across, to survive living in this country. This is exactly what happenswith emigrants in Spain, who arrive in the country in order to find a job, andthey have to learn some basic notions on the languate as soon as possible tosurvive. Due to the similarities aims of both groups of students, I will makereference to both of them in the next paragraph. Usually, this group of studentsare quite irregular in attending class because of other necessities they may have– work, researching in the university, other clases at the same time, etc. Becauseof these reasons, it is more appropiate to follow the Task-based Approach,included in the Communicative Methodology. The main objective of thisApproach is the communicative act; to be able to achieve the CommunicativeCompetence, term coined by Dell Hymes. He believed that competence alonewas not enough to explain a native speaker's knowledge, as a native can not onlyuse grammatically correct forms, but also knows when and where to use them.Hymes proposed an approach to investigate the rules of use of alanguage in its environment, so, in the different sociocultural contexts in whichspeakers make their verbal communication. To make this approach, he wasbased on the Chomskian dichotomy on competency and performance. Itexplained that the Performance is only the end of the iceberg of the Competence,which represents all the grammar rules that an ideal speaker/listener has got,who is able to reproduce an infinite number of propositions. Competence bothexplains and characterises a speaker's knowledge of a language. Performance,however, is a poor mirror of competence. A sentence, even if it is grammaticallycorrect, does not have to be necessarily correct on the Performance. Thisperformance can be influenced by other psychological factors, such as fear,hysterism, embarrassment,etc. Also by Physiology factors like tiredness,sleepiness, or other environmental factors, like the context, noise, music etc.For Savignon, Comunicative Competence could be defined as:...the ability to function in a truly communicative setting -that is a dynamic exchange in which linguistic competencemust adapt itself to the total information input, bothlinguistic and paralinguistic of one or more interlocutors.Communicative competence includes grammaticalcompetence (sentence level grammar), socio-linguisticcompetence (an understanding of the social context inwhich language is used), discourse competence (anunderstanding of how utterances are strung together toform a meaningful whole), and strategic competence (alanguage user’s employment of strategies to make the bestuse of what s/he knows about how a language works, inorder to interpret, express, and negotiate meaning in agiven context) 2 .2 Savignon, S. “Evaluation of Communicative Competence: The ACTFL ProvisionalProficiency Guidelines.” Te Modern Language Journal. vol. 59. (1985), p. 129-134.