Strategic Competence for Intercultural Communication

Xu Lisheng

Zhejiang University, China

Abstract: This paper is about the issue of strategic competence in relation to intercultural communication. It begins with a brief review of the development of the notion of communicative competence, and then it examines the relationship of its different components to culture, pointing out that strategic competence, unlike sociolinguistic or discourse competence, is not culture-specific and therefore is supposed to play a more crucial role in intercultural communication. Next the paper discusses research on strategic competence, particularly the contributions it can make to our efforts to understand and improve intercultural communication. It also raises some questions that further research should address. Finally it stresses the special significance of exploring strategic competence to studying intercultural communication and indicates implications that the exploration may have for teaching a second or foreign language for intercultural communication.

Introduction

      This paper discusses the issue of strategic competence (SC) in relation to intercultural communication, representing one of my research efforts on intercultural communicative competence.

      Communicative competence, a notion proposed by Hymes (1972) and some other scholars as a challenge to Chomsky's (1965) concept of   linguistic competence, has now become a primary theoretical construct in sociolinguistics and a number of related disciplines, especially for researching into the relationship of language and communication to society and culture. Until recently, however, intercultural communication studies were more concerned with actual performance than with the competence underlying it. On the other hand, many researches on communicative competence were conducted without taking into consideration the real situations of intercultural communication, which, we can say, is well on its way to becoming an everyday phenomenon the world over today. In recent years, there have been more studies in which communicative competence is approached in intercultural perspective, but scholarly attention seems to have been exclusively on its sociolinguistic and discourse aspects. As for SC, one of the four components of which the overall communicative competence is supposed to consist (Canale, 1983; Swain, 1984), research literature is still comparatively scant. However, this should not lead us to conclude that studying SC is not as important as studying other components of communicative competence, though it may suggest that studying SC is more difficult.

        In this paper, I first review briefly the development of the notion of communicative competence to culture and try to reveal the differences that exist among them in this respect, arguing that SC, unlike sociolinguistic and discourse competencies, is not culture-specific and it plays a particularly salient role in intercultural communication. Next, I discuss SC research and point out what it can contribute to our efforts to understand and improve intercultural communication. A few questions are raised for further researches to address. In conclusion, I stress again the importance of exploring SC to intercultural communication studies and indicate some implications the exploration may have for second- and foreign-language teaching.

Background

     The notion of communicative competence was first introduced by Hymes in a 1966 paper later published in revised form in 1972. Other scholars, such as Habermas (1970) and Campbell and Wales (1970), have also used the term, but Hymes' elaborated concept remains the most influential of all. Communicative competence defined by Hymes was a challenge to Chomsky's use of the term competence (1965). Chomsky, in order to delimit the area of his linguistic study, made a fundamental distinction between competence (the speaker's knowledge of his or her language) and performance (the actual use of language in concrete situations) and emphasized that linguists are concerned with the former, but not the latter. In his definition, linguistic competence is the tacit knowledge of language structure, the knowledge that is invariably possessed by the ideal speaker in a homogeneous speech community.

     Hymes found Chomsky's concept problematic since it seemed to him to be limited in that it included only grammatical competence and assumed uniform competence within the individual and the language group. He argued that the notion of competence should be extended to include the ‘rules of use' as well as the ‘rules of grammar'. According to him, competence should describe the knowledge and ability of individuals for appropriate language use in the communicative events in which they find themselves in any particular speech community. Therefore, linguists' task should be not only the description of what a speaker knows about the grammar but also an accounting for what he or she knows about the appropriate use of the language. In a word, Hymes's notion of competence highlights its sociocultural dimensions.

   In Hymes' model of communicative competence, there are four sectors that characterize the individual's underlying knowledge and ability for language use:

a)       what is possible according to the individual's knowledge of the linguistic system in the speech community;

b)       what is feasible in the psycholinguistic capacity of the individual, e.g. the individual's memory and perception;

c)       what is appropriate in relation to the context of the communicative event;

d)       what actually occurs or does not occur in language use.

After Hymes, there appeared a growing literature on communicative competence. Various aspects of communicative competence were further explored and new models were also proposed. In their attempt to offer a clear, all-embracing conception of what it means to know a language, Canale and Swain proposed a modular framework of three (Canale & Swain, 1980), and later four components (Canale,1983; Swain, 1984), by which to describe communicative competence:

a) grammatical competence, including vocabulary, word formation, sentence formation, pronunciation, spelling and linguistic semantics;

• b) sociolinguistic competence, addressing the extent to which utterances are produced and understood appropriately in different sociolinguistic contexts depending on contextual factors such as status of participants, purposes of the interaction, and norms or conventions of interaction;
• c) discourse competence, concerning mastery of how to combine grammatical forms and meanings to achieve a unified spoken or written text in different genres;
• d) strategic competence, concerning mastery of verbal and non-verbal communication strategies that may be called into action to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to limiting conditions in actual situations or to insufficient competence in one or more of the other areas of communicative competence and to enhance the effectiveness of communication.

      Canale and Swain's notion of communicative competence is obviously different form Hymes' in some aspects. For instance, they consider it unnecessary to include factors like memory and perception in one's model of communicative competence, for, in their opinion, those factors are normally general psychological constraints on actual performance.

      But the most significant difference between their model and Hyme's or many others', perhaps their most valuable contribution to communicative competence theory, is that they have integrated into their model communication strategies that people often employ to cope with the problems arising in the course of communication. According to them, such strategies form an essential aspect of communicative competence, i.e. SC, which should be considered as no less important than grammatical or sociolinguistic competence. This extension of the notion of communicative competence, as I shall discuss later, has important implications for studying intercultural communication.

     Unlike Chomsky or Hymes, who, when talking about competence, usually has the native speaker in mind, Canale and Swain are more concerned with the non-native speaker learning and using a second or foreign language. That may be one of the reasons that they have extended the notion of communicative competence to include the ability of strategic use of language. Non-native speakers are generally supposed to have more problems when they try to use a second or foreign language to communicate with native speakers or with other non-native speakers. So the success of the communication often depends largely on their ability of employing communication strategies to deal with whatever problems that may arise in the course of communication.

The Relationships of the Competencies to Culture

     There is no doubt that communicative competence is shaped by social and cultural conventions of a particular speech community. Therefore, what is regarded as communicative competence in one speech community may be regarded as something else in another. In fact, the notion itself emerged to relate competence with the sociocultural contexts. To Hymes, communicative competence is actually part of cultural competence (Putz, 1992).

    But it does not follow that we can assume that all the components of communicative competence have the same relationship with culture. On the contrary, it may actually be the case that some are very closely related to culture while others are not. So it is necessary for us to distinguish between what are culture-specific and what are not in the components of communicative competence. An examination of the relationships of the competencies to culture will reveal the differences existing between SC and other competencies. As a result of such differences, the roles that various competencies can play in intercultural communication will be somewhat different from one another.

     Whether grammatical competence is culture-specific or not is quite controversial. To advocators of Linguistic Relativity, the idea that a grammatical system is a specific way of organizing experience and ultimately a particular cultural practice, grammatical competence can hardly be viewed as separated from culture. Contrastively, proponents of Linguistic Universalism like Chomsky hold that grammar in its true sense has little to do with culture and should be regarded as something independent of the sociocultural environment in which language is used.

     Though scholars disagree greatly in conceptualizing the relationship of grammar to culture, the history of second- and foreign-language teaching practice the world over seems to have suggested that the grammatical competence of a language can be acquired out of the sociocultural contexts of the community in which the language is used as the native tongue. We all know that in the world today there are so many people who are bilingual but not necessarily bicultural, and this may serve as an indication that grammar and culture, to some extent at least, are tow different things. Take speakers of English as an example. English as a world language used in communities of different cultures has become an undeniable fact. Speakers of English, whether they are American or British or Indian or Singaporean or South African, can be said to have almost the same grammatical competence of the language, though there are still some differences in their actual realization of the competence. That might also be one of the reasons that some scholars, when talking about language competence, prefer to give grammatical competence the same status as communicative competence and consider them complementary to each other instead of the latter subsuming the former.

      Sociolinguistic competence is obviously very culture-specific. What lies in the centre of sociolinguistic competence is appropriateness, appropriateness of form as well as meaning in communication. Researches have shown that norms for the appropriate conduct of speech vary considerably from culture to culture. What is linguistically appropriate for a given speech situation in one culture may be completely inappropriate for the same speech situation in another culture. For instance, studies of the ways in which people compliment, apologize, complain, refuse and deny, etc. have all revealed great cultural differences in patterns of interaction and the underlying cultural values which are thus expressed. Sociolinguistic norms are actually part of culture and acquiring sociolinguistic competence of a language is, in a sense, acquiring the culture in which the language is used.

      The knowledge of sociolinguistic norms of a particular culture, though crucial to successful interaction within the speech communities of that culture, will not often be of much help in intercultural communication, where participants may bring conflicting norms for appropriateness into play. There always exists a serious potential for communicative breakdowns when people from different cultural backgrounds and therefore with different sociolinguistic competence are involved in communication. In second- and foreign-language teaching, more emphasis is now placed on helping learners acquire the native-like sociolinguistic competence and it is expected that cultural differences in this aspect will be resolved and many communicative problems and breakdowns will be avoided as soon as non-native learners have acquired the native-like sociolinguistic competence.

      However, this seems to be rather problematic. On the one hand the native-like sociolinguistic competence has proved to be far more difficult than grammatical competence for non-native learners to acquire unless they can actually get themselves into the associated sociocultural situations. On the other, since sociolinguistic norms are, by their very nature, reflective of the cultural values of the speech community, insisting on taking the norms of one culture, usually the native-speaker's culture, as norms for intercultural communication is sometimes found to be quite threatening to the cultural identity of participants from other cultures. Siegal's (1996) recent investigation of Western women learning Japanese discovers that the Westerners tend to resist the pressure of being totally appropriate in using Japanese because to them this means a change of their original cultural identity. To behave linguistically appropriately in Japanese, as has been pointed out, makes them feel that they are not allowed to be autonomous freely operating individuals, which Westerners usually value very much.

As Paulston (1992) has remarked, acquiring the native-like sociolinguistic competence can help, for example, a Chinese studying in the U.S.A. communicate appropriately with the British or the American, but it won't be much help for a Chinese communicating in English with an Indian or a South African. In the same way, it would be foolish for an American businessman in China using English to insist on only the sociolinguistic norms of American English. Imposing the norms and conventions for interaction of one culture on intercultural communication really involves the danger of may look like cultural imperialism. It is more likely that norms for intercultural communication are not based exclusively on one or the other cultural group's norms, but rather are negotiated and constructed out of both. What such intercultural norms will be like depends on the particular context in which the interaction takes place. In short, what is culturally appropriate may not be interculturally appropriate. Sociolinguistic competence acquired in any particular culture can hardly assure us of our behaving appropriately in intercultural communication.

Discourse competence is also culture-specific, though the way it is relate to culture is somewhat different from the way sociolinguistic competence is. Discourse patterns may not be confined to any particular speech situation, but they are often reflective of the mind-style as well as the values of a cultural group. Cultural differences in this aspect sometimes can be more difficult to discern and handle when people from different cultures are communicating with each other.

      The research results from contrastive discourse analysis and contrastive rhetoric have indicated that discourse patterns and structures are often closely related to the cultural norms and meaning systems of the society using the language. A well-known research example is Kaplan's (1966) study of paragraph organization of several major language groups. His study, and many following him, has even in academic discourse. For instance, digressions are often found in German academic texts, while In English texts, such digressions can hardly occur, for they would be considered as unacceptable for lack of focus and cohesiveness (Clyne, 1981; 1987). Such cultural differences can also be found in spoken discourses. For example, Halmari's (1993) investigation of the business telephone conversations by Finns and Anglo-Americans has discovered that there are cultural differences in interruption behaviour and that the non-topical elements of the conversations tend to be lengthy for Finns than for Anglo-Americans.

Using the same language in communication does not reduce such differences to a minimum. Scollon and Wong Scollon (1991) have found that when East Asians are communicating with Westerners in English, there is a tendency for them to delay the introduction of topics, which is unexpected from the point if view of English-speaking Westerners and often leaves them confused about what the topic is. Conversely, Westerners' way of introducing topics early in a conversation strikes the Asian as abrupt or rude. More recently, the research of Young (1994), in which she examined the difficulties persistently marring Sino-American interactions, has shown us that the Chinese discourse patterns seem to be just the reverse of the English discourse conventions in that definitive summary statements of main arguments are delayed until the end. She explains that the Chinese discourse patterns persist even in the English of many Chinese because for the Chinese they are closely relate to the cultural concept of face, which lies at the very core of personal identity construction. In this sense, the discourse transfer as well as the sociolinguistic transfer in using a second or foreign language, which is usually considered as mistakes and may even lead to an impression of being unable to use the language properly, can sometimes be better understood as the speaker's efforts to assert his or her own cultural identity.

Unlike sociolinguistic or discourse competence, SC is not culture-specific. Though there has not been much research on the relationship of strategic competence to culture, available empirical results and anecdotal evidence have often seemed to confirm the assumption that strategic competence is greatly independent of the particular culture in which it is acquired. Paribakht (1985), supported by his analysis of the realization of communication strategies by different groups of English speakers, claims that strategic competence appears to develop in the speaker's first language with his or her increasing language experience, and to be freely transferable to his or second language. This transfer, unlike others such as sociolinguistic or discourse transfer has little to do with culture and therefore does not cause interference in communicating with native speakers or other non-native speakers of a different cultural group.

Perhaps the cultural background may have some influence on the individual's preference of certain communication strategies to others.  For example, after comparing U.S. American and Japanese responses to embarrassing predicaments, Imahori and Cupach (1994) have reported that U.S. Americans used humor as a copying strategy more frequently than the Japanese, who relied heavily on remediation strategies.  However, in spite of such differences, potentials of communication strategies are more likely to be shared cross-culturally, though their actual realization can be affected by some factors including the individual's cultural background.

To Canale and Swain (1980), all the components of communicative competence are equally crucial to successful communication.  In theory this is probably true and, out of communicative context, we can hardly say which is more crucial than others.  But, in reality, there are various types of communication and they are different in situations and conditions.  Such differences may demand more or less of some abilities than others from the participants of communication.  For instance, communication usually involves a degree of unpredictability.  In intercultural communication, where there are more differences and less shared knowledge between participants, SC often plays a more salient role.  In many cases, communication strategies are the only resources that the participants can draw on to cope with communicative problems, including the problems arising from a higher degree of unpredictability.

SC Research and Intercultural Communication

SC research is still somewhat recent.  Though Selinker (1972) coined the term communication strategy in 1972 discussing ‘strategies of second language communication' and there were a few studies in 1970s, the real ‘career' of the research in this area started in the early 1980s, when Canale and Swain extended the notion communicative competence to include strategic competence as one of its primary components.  In 1983, French and Kasper (1983) had an edited volume published, which contained many important papers on communication strategies.  It was followed by increasing research interest and a growing number of publications since then.  Most of the researches have focused on what strategic competence consists of, namely, communication strategies and their use in communication, particularly second language speakers' communication with native speakers.

Since there have been different approaches to SC and communication strategies, it is not possible to make general comments on all the major issues of the research in this paper.  For the purpose of the present discussion, two things are to be mentioned.

First, by its very definition, SC, the mastery of communication strategies has got much to do with intercultural communication. It is true that there is no universally agreed definition of communication strategies, though Canale and Swain's concept of SC seems to have been generally accepted.  Of all the definitions that have been offered so far, the one given by Farech and Kasper (1983) is most extensively used.  They defined communication strategies as ‘potentially conscious plans for solving what to an individual presents itself as a problem in reach a particular goal'.  The two criteria here are problem-orientedness and potential consciousness, of which only the first has widely considered as essential.  Now most researchers in this field agree that the main purpose of communication strategies is to manage communication problems.  Though Canale (1983) extended the scope of communications strategies to include effect-enhancing devices, many scholars prefer to treat them separately from problem-solving devices, which are regarded as the communication strategies proper.  Since communication problems are more likely to occur in intercultural communication than in communication within the same cultural group, it naturally follows that a skilful use of communication strategies will be very crucial to success in intercultural communication.

   Second, the developing of the research, Faerch and Kasper's original conceptualization of communication strategies, which concerned only one problem type, resource deficits---gaps in speakers' knowledge preventing them from verbalizing messages, has been duly extended to cover a much wider range of communication problems. This suggests that research on SC can now make more contributions to studying intercultural communication.  For example, in an extended taxonomy of problem-solving strategies recently proposed by Dornyei and Scott (1995), the strategies included are intended cope with four types of communications problems: a) resource deficits; b) processing time pressure; c) own-performance problems, whatever is problematic in one's own communicative performance; d) other-performance problems, whatever is problematic in the communicative performance of the other participant(s). Each type of problems is usually dealt with by using certain strategies. For instance, various negotiation strategies are often employed to deal with the problems of the third type. The strategies a re classified according to the manner of problem-management, that is, how they contribute to resolving conflicts and achieving mutual understanding. There are three basic categories: direct, indirect, and interactional strategies. Most traditionally identified communication strategies are direct strategies, for they provide a means of solving the problems directly. Indirect strategies are intended to help create the conditions necessary for achieving communicative goals. For instance, feigning understanding is sometimes quite necessary because it can prevent breakdowns and keep the communication channel open so that the intended goals of the interaction can finally be achieved. Interactional strategies involve co-exchanges, the chief purpose of which is to solve the problems faced by both or all participants of the communication. Such a taxonomy of communication strategies is clearly more relevant to investigating intercultural communication situations.

      SC research itself is certainly not without problems. From the view point of studying intercultural communication, one of the problems is that the research focus has been too much upon the second or foreign language speakers, particularly learners, in their attempts to communicate with native speakers of the language. But the real situation of intercultural communication is that native speakers will also encounter some problems that they seldom do in intracultural communication and the responsibility of solving the communication problems has to be shared by both or all of the participants. It is therefore important to research into the strategic language use of native speakers in intercultural communication if we hope to have complete picture of communication strategies and their uses for achieving cross-cultural understanding and to form a well-grounded notion of SC. For instance, Yule and Tarone (1990) have pointed out that SC must involve the ability to access the relationship between one's own knowledge and the interlocutor's knowledge in an area, and then to use one's knowledge effectively in accordance with that assessment. Obviously, this ability is no less, if not more, essential for native speakers taking part in intercultural communication.

     As a matter of fact, native speakers may often have to make no less use than non-native speakers of various strategies to prevent and solve communication problems in cross-cultural interactions. Those native speakers having stronger SC and making better good use of strategies naturally stand great chances of communicating successfully with non-native speaker in intercultural communications. Unfortunately, there has been little research on the use of communication strategies by native speakers when they try to communicate cross-culturally with non-native speakers, except some study of what is called ‘ foreigner talk', concerned mainly with native speakers' coping with the problems caused by their non-native interlocutors' inadequate grammatical competence. It is now quite necessary to extend the research scope to include every aspect of language use--- production as well as comprehension--- of all the participants---native as well as non-native---in communication.

     In order to gain a better understanding of SC for intercultural communication, I think that there are still a few important questions that future research on SC should address:

1)       Are there any significant similarities and differences between the strategic use of language for intracultural communication and for intercultural communication? We have had some researches on communication strategies in first language use, but the research focus has been exclusively on children, whose communication problems are mostly resource deficits.

2)       What are the significant similarities differences between the strategic language use of the native speaker and that of the non-native speaker in intercultural communications?  What effects(s) the linguistic proficiency of an individual can have upon his or her strategic use of the language?

3)       How and to what degrees the transfer of strategic competence from first language to second language is possible? And whether it is different and, if it is, how is it different from other language transfers?

4)       Are there any substantial influences that the individual's cultural background may have upon their characteristic preference of some strategies over others in intercultural communications?  If there are, what are the most salient cultural factors in this respect?  To what extent does the cultural distance between the participants of the communication determine what strategies are employed and how much use they have to be made of?

Concluding Remarks

     Intercultural communication studies should not be occupied only with investigating and analysing communicative problems, difficulties or breakdowns resulted from cultural differences.  It is as important to study how people tackle problems, overcome difficulties and repair breakdowns.  It has to be noted that while researches on sociolinguistics and the related cultural differences can help explain much of the failure and misunderstanding in intercultural communication, researches on SC and the use of communication strategies  may account for many cases of  communication in which cross-cultural understanding is achieved in spite of seemingly formidable difficulties and problems involved.  In this sense, researching into the issues of SC is really essential to intercultural communication studies, the ultimate aim of which is to help improve our intercultural communication practice.

     For teaching a second or foreign language for intercultural communication, researches on SC will have some important implications.  More importance should be attached to developing SC of second and foreign-language learners.  Whether communication strategies can explicitly taught or not is still controversial, but there is little doubt that learner's SC often play important role in their attempts to communicate cross-culturally. Yule and Tarone (1990) have pointed out that some people may not have proper SC  even in their first language, so they will need much assistance in developing SC when they are learning a second or foreign language.  Many scholars and teachers now consider it necessary to incorporate developing learners' SC into second- and foreign- language instruction though they still disagree on that are the proper and effective ways to do so.  The methods suggested by some researches such as Chen (1990) and Dornyei and Thurrell (1991) to help facilitate  learners' development of SC have yet to be proved in teaching practice.  But it seems necessary to mention that Chen (1990) even calls for a reform in syllabus design.  In his opinions, most of the syllabuses we have now are designed to prevent learners from running into problems and therefore contribute little to the development of their SC.  As a result, many learners, even some with fairly high linguistic proficiency, are often found quite incompetent in dealing with communicative problems, especially the problems arising in situations for which our teaching has not prepared them.

     And second- and foreign- language testing will also have to pay more attention to SC.  As a matter of fact, what has been extensively tested so far is mostly learners' grammatical competence and, occasionally, their sociolinguistic and discourse competencies.  SC seems to have never been included in our test.  It should be recognized that our test cannot be truly reliable indicators of the learners' overall competence in the target language before we find a way to test their SC.   We all know that there often exist discrepancies between what is tested and what learners have actually acquired and are able to do in real situations of communication.  Including SC in our tests can, to some extent at least, reduce such a discrepancy.  Of course, to find an effective way to test learners' strategic competence is not easy, but it is surely worth our greater efforts. 

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(From Journal of Zhejiang University(Science), 第一卷，第4期, 2000,12)