Lecture 1: General problems of Foreign Language teaching

Existential Competence (savoir-etre, see 5.1.3) may be considered as the sum of the individual characteristics, personality traits and attitudes which concern, for example, self-image and one’s view of others and willingness to engage with other people in social interaction. This type of competence is not seen simply as resulting from immutable personality characteristics. It includes factors which are the product of various kinds of acculturation and maybe modified.
These personality traits, attitude and temperaments are parameters which have to be taken into account in language learning and teaching. Accordingly, even though they may be difficult to define, they should be included in a framework of reference. They are considered to be part of an individual’s general competences and therefore an aspect of his or her abilities. In so far as they are capable of being acquired or modified in use and through learning (for example, of one or more languages), attitude formation maybe an objective. As has frequently been noted, existential competences are culture-related and therefore sensitive areas for intercultural perceptions and relations: the way one member of a specific culture expresses friendliness and interest may be perceived by someone from another culture as aggressive or offensive.
Communicative language competence can be considered as comprising several components: linguistics, sociolinguistics and pragmatic. Each of these components is postulated as comprising, in particular, syntactical knowledge and skills and know-how. Linguistic competences include lexical, phonological, syntactical knowledge and skills and other dimensions of language as system, independently of the sociolinguistic value of its variations and the pragmatic functions of its realizations. This component, considered here from the point of view of a given individual’s Communicative language competence, relates not only to the range and quality of knowledge (e.g. in terms of phonetic distinctions made or the extend and precision of vocabulary) but also cognitive organization and the way this knowledge is stored (e.g. the various associative networks in which the speaker places a lexical item) and to its accessibility (activation, recall and availability). Knowledge may be conscious and readily expressible or may not (e.g. once again in relation to mastery of a phonetic system) its organization and accessibility will vary from one individual to another and vary also within the same individual (e.g. for a plurilingual person depending on the varieties inherent in his or her plurilingual competence). It can also be held that the cognitive organization of vocabulary and the storing of expressions, etc. depend, amongst other things, on the cultural features of the community or communities in which the individual has been socialized and where his or her learning has occurred.