Concepts of Sociolinguistic Competence

CONTENTS:
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................3
CHAPTER I. RELATED LITERATURE

1. Concepts of Sociolinguistic Competence ....................................................6

2. Language Behavior and Social Communication ........................................11

CHAPTER II. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

2.1. Profile of Foreign National College Students ...............................................16

2.2. Socio-cultural Perspective ...........................................................................21

CONCLUSION ..................................................................................................32

GLOSSARY ......................................................................................................34

REFERENCES .................................................................................................35

INTRODUCTION

On May 6, President Shavkat Mirziyoyev chaired a meeting on measures to improve the system of teaching foreign languages. Several areas of knowledge are determined every year in Uzbekistan, the development of which is given priority attention. This year physics and foreign languages ​​have become such areas.“The time has come to create in Uzbekistan a new system of teaching foreign languages, which will become a solid foundation for the future. Since we set ourselves the goal of building a competitive state, from now on, graduates of schools, lyceums, colleges and universities must be fluent in at least two foreign languages. This strict requirement should become the main criterion for the work of the head of each education institution”, Shavkat Mirziyoyev said.¹
Linguistic competence as emphasized by Chomsky is the ideal language system that makes it possible for speakers to produce and understand an infinite number of sentences in their language, and to distinguish grammatical sentences from ungrammatical sentences. The concept was introduced in 1965 to address certain assumptions about language.
Mizne (1997) stated that one of the contributing factors for incompetence in the language is when the speaker does not know which utterances are appropriate in the social situation in which he or she is speaking. This ability to adjust one’s speech to fit the social situation in is called sociolinguistic competence, and without this ability, even accurate grammatical utterances can convey a meaning entirely different from that which the speaker intended.
Sociolinguistic competence refers to the mastery of the cultural rules of use and rules of discourse that are at play in different languages. With respect to cultural rules of use, the emphasis is on appropriateness of communicative acts and the naturalness of speech within given socio-cultural contexts. With respect to the rules of discourse, the focus is on expressiveness using paralinguistic communication, and the rules of cohesion and coherence.
Many non-native speakers of English received their training in that language in a formal educational setting, i.e. in classroom learning sessions preceding their migration to any Anglophone country and purportedly that such trainings will make it easier for them to interact with people in those places who speak English.
On the contrary, many of them still struggle when they experience the reality of communicating with a real Anglophone, especially in the distinct use of English in various actual social situations that seem to be so different from the English used in the academic setting to which they were made previously familiar with. Such struggle induces them to even improve or re-learn English as sensitized to its varied uses in actual communication contexts and which is imperative for their survival in those countries.
The aforementioned example also inspired the type of parallel challenges in English language learning as taken up in the Philippines which is regarded as one of the leading countries that adopt English as a Second Language (ESL). According to McGeown (2012), the Philippines is fast becoming the world’s low-cost English language teacher – with rapid increases in overseas students coming to learn English or study in English-speaking universities.
In addition, the Bureau of Immigration Statistics found out that there is an increase in the number of foreign students of more than 47, 000 in 2013. The increase in the number of foreign nationals enrolling in Philippine Colleges and Universities may be attributed to the proficiency of Filipino teachers in the use of English as a medium ofinstruction. Many of these foreign nationals in the country have been taking up Bachelor of Arts and medical courses, including dentistry (Tubeza, 2013).
Contrary to that, little is known of the status of the language learning difficulties of foreign national students in the Philippines. De Guzman, et al. (2006), a professor from the University of Santo Tomas explained that English learning difficulties of foreign national students exist both in daily conversation and in the academic setting. These difficulties are relative to their sociolinguistic competence, motivation in using the English language, and cultural factors. Thus, there is a need to explain the possible reasons, factors or causes of such learning difficulty as experienced by these foreign national students.