The Importance of Linguistic Competence in Teaching English as a Foreign Language

Abstract

In this paper it has been chosen to examine currently accepted principles of “communicative approaches” to second language in the theo-ry of languages. The examination of the theoretical bases has led us to question some of the existing principles, which is consistent with a more comprehensive framework for the consideration of linguistic competence. The general background to linguistic competence is studied by many scien-tists. The notion of “linguistic competence” has been developed for many years and we will suggest some directions for the research that bear either directly to the goal of the research. Linguistic competence is the system of linguistic knowledge possessed and is distinguished from linguistic per-formance. It is the way a language system that is used in communication. Noam Chomsky introduced this concept in his elaboration of generative grammar, where it has been widely adopted and competence is the only level of language that is studied. According to Chomsky, competence is the ideal language system that enables speakers to produce and understand an infinite number of sentences in their language, and to distinguish gram-matical sentences from ungrammatical sentences. In 1970 years the En-glish language was the goal of teaching foreign language. As the linguistic competence is the part of the communicative competence and the scientist as Haims (1972), Kanal and Swan (1980) and Alkon (2000) worked on it in their works.