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Contributions of the Bakhtin Circle to ‘Communicative Competence’
Harvard University
Soviet scholar Mikhail Bakhtin's writings were not available in English in 1966, when Dell Hymes first wrote about communicative competence. Yet there are important similarities in their ideas: their explicit opposition to the Saussurian dichotomy between langue and parole; their belief that speech is both structured and emergent; their research on literature as well as language; and their conceptions of language acquisition.
Differences can be separated into themes emphasized by each scholar. Hymes draws on a much greater base of sociolinguistic research; and he frequently writes about linguists’ responsibility to work for change, especially in education. Bakhtin analysed the intrinsic intertextuality of all utterances, and the consequences of heteroglossia for speakers and writers–notably, intrapersonal conflicts during the process of expression because of the auras that accrue to language forms from awareness of their previous contextualized use.
Examples of such conflicts include an account of one black teacher's struggles, in a one-year university master's program, with the academic writing expected by his professors.