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Trámites and Transportes: The Acquisition of Second Language Communicative Competence for One Speech Event in Puno, Peru
University of Pennsylvania
In a series of papers and books, beginning in 1966, Hymes argued for a redefinition of linguistic competence as originally proposed by Chomsky. To differentiate the broad competence he envisioned from both competence and performance as defined by Chomsky, Hymes coined the expression ‘communicative competence’. This communicative competence includes four sectors: what is possible (grammatical), feasible, appropriate, and done; and can be analyzed in terms of eight components of speech acts or events described under his mnemonic ‘SPEAKING’.
In the quarter of a century since then, communicative competence has come to mean a number of things to a variety of people, especially in language teaching fields, but Hymes's original conception seems the most durable and sound to this writer. This paper uses results of an incidental piece of ethnographic research in Puno, Peru, to explore Hymes's model for one case. Over a period of several months, the researcher was involved in a number of speech events and acts making up one prolonged speech event: the negotiation of a driver's license at the Ministry of Transportation in Puno, Peru.
The paper describes the speech events involved and analyzes them in the light of Hymes's model. Since the events were carried out in Spanish, a second language for the researcher, the paper also suggests implications of the analysis for an understanding of the acquisition of second language communicative competence.