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Teaching for Three Kinds of Competence
Alexander C. H. Tung
Abstract
This paper points out that all our foreign-language departments share a
rationale in designing their curricula. It concludes that the rationale
is in actuality a foreign-language teacher‟s threefold mission: to teach for the students‟ linguistic competence, literary competence, and
communicative competence. In order to reach the conclusion, the
paper touches on such topics as practical vs. impractical courses,
literary vs. ordinary language, literariness or poeticalness,
grammaticality and poeticality, grammar and rhetoric, and the
structuring art of selection and combination. To discuss the relevant
topics and elucidate some relevant issues, the Russian Formalist ideas,
the speech act theory, and some foreign-language teaching methods or
approaches are much dwelled on, and some important points are made.
We suggest that linguistic competence aims at truth (correctness of
language), literary competence at beauty (beautifulness of language)
and communicative competence at goodness (appropriateness of
language). We also assert that teaching is an art (of selection and
combination); we have “impractical teachings” indeed, but never
“impractical courses” so long as the courses involve the use of the
target language. Finally, we claim that the idea of teaching for the
three kinds of competence is as time-honored as Confucianism.
Key phrases:
1. linguistic competence 2. literary competence 3. communicative competence
4. literariness or poeticalness 5. language-teaching methods or approaches
6. Russian Formalism 7. speech act theory
Introduction: Literariness
During the last few years, I have been called upon to evaluate a good number of
the so-called “Departments of Foreign Languages and Literature(s),” “Departments of (Applied) English,” “Departments of Applied Foreign Languages,” etc., here in our country. I find there is one thing common to the curricula of all such departments:
they all offer literature courses along with linguistics courses and language-training
courses, although some of the departments have a higher proportion of literature
courses while others offer more linguistics courses or language-training courses.
This fact reveals that all such departments of ours share a rationale in designing their
curricula. But what is the rationale?
Before we proceed to find the answer, I must point out another fact commonly
found in our departments. That is, many students of our departments, especially
those in the departments that offer more literature courses, keep wondering why they
should take so many literature courses. “Aren‟t we here just to learn such language skills as those of listening, speaking, reading, writing, and translation?” They often
ask themselves, and their teachers or departments as well, questions like this. Some
of them even go so far as to protest against listing literature courses among the
required courses and plead that they should be provided with more “practical courses.”
Those students who want more “practical courses” may have the delusion that only such “practical courses” as English Conversation and English Composition can
teach “practical English” while such courses as English Literature and American
Literature can only teach “non-practical English,” that is, English not directly related to our everyday English. This delusion is based on the idea that literary language is
distinguishable from ordinary language. And this idea is a debatable presupposition
of the so-called Russian Formalism.
Roman Jakobson, as we know, once wrote: “The subject of literary scholarship is not literature in its totality, but literariness (literaturnost), i.e., that which makes a given work a work of literature.”
1 Since Jakobson made this remark, scholars have
2 In the course of seeking “literariness” or “poeticalness,” they have once considered the idea of “fictionality” indeed tried vigorously to inquire into “the distinguishing features of the literary and the use of images as the “distinguishing features.” But the typically Russian materials” as Boris Eichenbaum wanted them to do.Formalist ideas in this regard are those developed by Viktor Shklovsky, Roman
Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky, and Jan Mukarovsky. Shklovsky regards “art as device”: he thinks that the literary or poetic art is to use verbal devices so as to “make strange” or “defamiliarize” the object depicted, and that literary or poetic language,
therefore, can prevent “automatization” and effect “perceptibility” of the object by such devices.3 Jakobson tells us that the distinctive feature of poetry “lies in the fact that a word is perceived as a word and not merely a proxy for the denoted object or an
outburst of an emotion, that words and their arrangement, their meaning, their
outward and inward form acquire weight and value of their own” (quoted in Erlich 183). In the same vein, Tomashevsky states that poetic language is “one of the linguistic systems where the communicative function is relegated to the background
and where verbal structures acquire autonomous value” (quoted in Erlich 183). And, similarly, Mukarovsky says that the function of poetic language “consists in the maximum of foregrounding of the utterance,” and he explains, thus:
In poetic language foregrounding achieves maximum intensity to the
extent of pushing communication into the background as the object
of expression and of being used for its own sake; it is not used in the
services of communication, but in order to place in the foreground
the act of expression, the act of speech itself. (43-44)
I have attacked, elsewhere, the Russian Formalist ideas of art as just the “laying bare” of one‟s technique, of literature as just a special use of language for its own
sake, of defamiliarization (ostranenie) as the sole distinctive feature of literary or
poetic language in contrast to practical language, and of foregrounding the utterance
as the sufficient aim and quality of literariness or poecticalness.
4 I have, instead,
suggested that literariness or poeticalness is no other than verbal artfulness. Thus,
literary or poetic language is an artful use of language for artistic purposes, not just a
special use of language for its own sake. In fact, literary or poetic language may or
may not deviate from or distort ordinary (or practical, standard, utilitarian, prosaic,
scientific, everyday, communicative, referential, etc.) language.5 Just as “art for art
sake” is but an empty slogan, so “language for language sake” (as implied in the
concept of foregrounding the utterance) can only ring with a bogus truth.
I have been of the opinion that a piece of literature (e.g. a poem, a play, a novel,
or an essay) is an artful piece of discourse “uttered” by the author to express a certain
idea or feeling to the reader. It is consequently like any discourse in that it also 6 It is only that when we talk about literature, the addresser or involves the six “constitutive factors in any speech event, in any act of verbal
sender is the author or writer, the addressee or receiver the reader, the contact the communication,” as pointed out by Jakobson: addresser, addressee, contact, message,
medium (the book, the magazine, the website, etc., where the text appears), the code, and context.
message the idea(s) or the feeling(s) of the author or writer, the code the language
used for the work, and the context the society or the world in which the work is
written, produced, and read. When we talk about the poem “Dover Beach,” for
example, the addresser or sender is Matthew Arnold, the addressee or receiver is each
reader reading the poem, the contact is the medium through which the poem is printed
and read, the message is the idea(s) or feeling(s) Arnold wants to convey through the
poem, the code is the English language used for the poem, and the context is the
society or world in which “Dover Beach” existed and exists. Besides being artful, a piece of literature like “Dover Beach” is different from a chance talk about the Beach in that the literary discourse continues to exist for different readers of different times
and places to read while an ordinary discourse, once uttered and heard (or not heard),
may just disappear for good, not to be noticed or mentioned again and again. So, in
a sense, a piece of literature is a written or printed speech kept for repeated listening
or reading.
7
Talking of “speech,” we must understand that in writing a piece of literature, an
author is also performing a “speech act.” Besides, a narrator in a literary work is also performing a speech act each time he or she narrates a story to the narratee.
Likewise, all the characters therein are also performing speech acts each time they
speak to one another. So, a literary work can be regarded as a “two-level speech
act,” at least, containing the first level of the author addressing the public and the
second level of the fictional figures--the narrator(s) and the character(s)—narrating or
speaking in the work. Furthermore, since the fictional figures are usually involved
in a series of talks, their speech acts naturally constitute what Teun van Dijik calls a
“global speech act or MACRO-SPEECH ACT‟ (238).
According to J. L. Austin, as we know, “to say something is in the full normal sense to do something” (94). Furthermore, “saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions
of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons” (104). To put it simply in
Austin‟s terms, normally a locutionary act is always both an illocutionary act and a
perlocutionary act. If we apply the speech act theory to the case of literature, we can
say, for instance, that “Dover Beach” is Arnold‟s written speech: when he wrote the
poem, he was not merely delivering a form of locution; he was also performing the
illocutionary act of warning his sweetheart and the world alike that Faith had ebbed
into a critical phase by the time he came to the Beach with his sweetheart. In
addition, we know the act must of necessity have become a perlocutionary act since
8 So, a piece of literature is never merely an aesthetic object—an object the poem has had some instructive effect and brought about some subsequent
with its intrinsic elements of beauty to delight people—it is also a social or ethical criticism.
object, an object with its communicative message aimed to bring about a certain
result and certainly often with some social or ethical consequence. That is why
9literature is traditionally said to have two functions: to delight and to instruct.
Whereas a literary work can be regarded as a literary discourse which like any
other form of communication shares the six essential factors of communication, and
like any other form of speech can be investigated in terms of illocutionary and
perlocutionary act, a literary work is nevertheless a special discourse indeed, but it is
special not only in its extrinsic functions or purposes (both to delight and to instruct
or inform) but also in its intrinsic textual details. There have been authors, to be
sure, who choose to see no differences between literature and ordinary language.
William Wordsworth, for instance, asserts that the poet is only “a man speaking to
men” (255), and that “there neither is, nor can be, any essential difference between
the language of prose and metrical composition” (253). And Moliére made the
philosopher in The Bourgeois Gentlemen tell Jourdain that all speech is either poetry
or prose and that Jourdain has been speaking prose all his life without knowing it.
In real life, however, what is called prose or verse, when referring to the language
used to compose drama, fiction, or poetry, is certainly distinguishable from ordinary
speech.
In The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms, it is said that “Words are used (1) for
ordinary speech, (2) for discursive or logical thought, and (3) for literature”
(Preminger et al. 291). Furthermore, it is suggested that “the language of ordinary
speech is not prose, or at least is prose only to the extent that it is not verse”; verse
has “some form of regular recurrence, whether meter, accent, vowel quality, rhyme,
alliteration, parallelism, or any combination of these”; while verse results from
conventionalizing ordinary speech by “recurrent rhythm,” prose results from
conventionalizing ordinary speech by “a consistent and logical sentence structure”;
discursive language “makes statements of fact, is judged by standards of truth and
falsehood, and is in the form of prose”; “all verse is literary ... [but] all literature is
not verse” (Preminger et al. 291).
In a book of mine, I have pointed out that the word “prose” can be understood in 10 In its broadest sense, prose is no other than ordinary speech: four different senses.it is, as just mentioned above, that language which is “not verse,” or that language which lacks any conventionalized verbal rhythm or structure. In a broader (but not
the broadest) sense, prose is that language which has a certain logical and linguistic
organization of words analyzable in terms of style or rhetoric, i.e. the so-called
“consistent and logical sentence structure.” In a narrower (but not the narrowest) sense, prose refers to the literary genre of “non-fiction,” which includes such literary sub-genres as biography, autobiography, character, memoir, diary, letter, dialogue,
maxim, and essay, but excludes such non-literary writings as found in books of
history, philosophy, and science. And in its narrowest sense, prose refers only to the
literary genre of essay, especially to the so-called “familiar essay,” which is often associated with such good prose writers or essayists as Montaigne, Bacon, and E. B.
White.
Normally, when we speak, the speech certainly seldom shows any
conventionalized verbal rhythm or structure as found in verse or good prose. That is,
we seldom speak words with enough artful arrangement of verbal details. In other
words, our speech often lacks prominent “literariness” or “poeticalness.” However,
we must bear it in mind that there are indeed a lot of people (e.g. such people as
called orators or humorists) who can occasionally speak not only prose but also verse
so artfully and effectively that we may even praise them by saying that they are
“speaking poetry.” Meanwhile, we must admit that all types of literature are
certainly written in either verse or prose. But just as ordinary speech can contain
verse, good prose, or even poetry, so literature can contain ordinary speech or prose
in its broadest sense. Sometimes, ordinary speech in literature may be as artful and
effective as any poetic or literary language in ordinary speech. For instance, after
Goneril and Regan have got power and tried to ill-treat their father king by all means,
Lear once says to them, “You think I‟ll weep:/No, I‟ll not weep” (II, iv, 282-3). What Lear says in that context is but ordinary speech. But the plain ordinary speech
is uttered as a natural contrast to the flowery (hence, literary or poetic) language
Lear‟s two elder daughters formerly used to coax his kingdom out of him. And this
natural contrast artfully and effectively pinpoints the “unnaturalness” of the daughters.
In his A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry, Geoffrey N. Leech considers many
aspects of poetic style. But while he admits that poetic language “may violate or deviate from the generally observed rules of the language in many different ways,” he also tells us that “most of what is considered characteristic of literary language ... has
its roots in everyday uses of language” (5-6). And so he further affirms in the
meantime that “just as there is no firm dividing line between „poetic‟ and „ordinary‟ language, so it would be artificial to enforce a clear division between the language of
poetry, considered as verse literature, and that of other literary kinds” (6). Then, as if to show the difficulty of separating poetic language from ordinary language or
other literary language, Leech in his “Examples for Discussion” cites Philip Larkin‟s “Toads” and asks “why this poem strikes one as colloquial and familiar in tone, rather
than formal or elevated” (20-21). Indeed, when we read the poem, we will feel that
the lines (at least such lines as “Lots of folk live on their wits:/Lecturers,
lispers,/Losels, loblolly-men, louts--/They don‟t end as paupers”) are words not unlikely to be heard in everyday speech.
I do not think it necessary for us here to go into the textual detail of a modern
poem like Larkin‟s “Toads” if we want to prove that literature or poetry can be made
of everyday speech in addition to verse or prose. In an ancient epic like Homer‟s Iliad, do we not see colloquial speech uttered by Achilles and other heroes? In a
drama, Greek or Roman, are dialogues really very much unlike ordinary speech? In
an 18
th-century novel, say Defoe‟s Robinson Crusoe or Swift‟s Gulliver’s Travels, do
thcharacters not speak like us in practical conversations? In a 19-century familiar
essay like Lamb‟s “Old China,” we read such statements as “I have an almost
feminine partiality for old china” and “I love the men with women‟s faces, and the
women, if possible, with still more womanish expressions.” Do the statements
deviate from ordinary language?
In Western literary theory, mimesis or imitation has since Plato been a central idea
used to explain the relation between literature and life. The mimetic theory, as does
the school of realism, stresses mainly the truthful, life-like verisimilitude found in a
literary work‟s verbal representation of people‟s actions in life. Nevertheless, a
really truthful or faithful representation of life in literature must of necessity include
the use of “real language” for the narrators‟ and characters‟ speech, since speaking is
a common action of people and speaking is normally done in “real language,” that is,
the common, communicative language. That is why, in any work of any literary
kind (except, perhaps, a surrealist or postmodernist work), the narrator of a story as
11
well as the characters in the story must of necessity speak such “real language” as
understandable to others. Talking of “real language,” Ferdinand de Saussure‟s distinction between langue (language) and parole (speaking) may come to our mind. According to Saussure,
langue is the language system preexisting actual speech, and parole is the individual utterance that realizes the system in actual instances of language.12 Behind this distinction, in fact, lurks our traditional understanding that we speak on the basis of,
or in accordance with, grammar. If we follow the rules of grammar (regarding the
formal features of a language, as the sounds, morphemes, words, or sentences), we
will be able to speak correctly. Perhaps langue is a broader term than grammar. It covers all linguistic aspects of a language (phonological, morphological, syntactical,
semantic, pragmatic, etc.), while grammar normally only refers to such things as
found in, say, Otto Jespersen‟s A Modern English Grammar (i.e., rules of sounds,
words, and sentences). Yet, all the same. Our speech or parole does observe the principles of langue or the rules of grammar. Grammaticality is, thus, of great
importance to any speaker.
From the idea of “grammar” we are easily led to the idea of “rhetoric.” Rhetoric, as we know, is primarily understood as “the art of persuasion in speaking or writing” or “a system of persuasive devices,” as it is mostly associated with an “orator”; however, rhetoric can also be seen “from an Aristotelian perspective as the art of
expressing truth clearly and logically,” and thus it is “a necessary part of education,” which along with grammar and logic constitutes “the TRIVIUM” studied in the medieval university (Frye 398). Anyway, today as we teach rhetoric in a language
department, we think of it as something that goes beyond grammar to enable the
students to speak or write not only “correctly” but also “effectively” or “beautifully.”
In the so-called Prague School Theses of 1929, it is suggested that language “has either a communicative function, that is, it is directed toward the signified, or a poetic
function, that is, it is directed toward the sign itself” (Pratt 8).
13 Theoretically speaking, both to speak (or write) “correctly” and to speak (or write) “effectively” are to fulfill the communicative function, since linguistic communication, as does any
other type of communication, normally expects to be effective but demands to be
correct first. An incorrect piece of communication may not be “fatal” sometimes; it may still be able to convey its message roughly, marring neither its intention nor its
result. Yet, more often than not, an incorrect instance of phrasing may cause
misunderstanding or even displeasure on the part of the addressee. So, considering
the “communicative function” of language, the teaching of grammar for correctness
and the teaching of rhetoric for effectiveness are both necessary.
As to the aim of speaking or writing “beautifully,” we must say, it is to be achieved not only by the teaching of rhetoric but also by the teaching of literature.
If language has the other “poetic function” to fulfill, the function is to be testified not just in a work like Aristotle‟s Rhetoric, Cicero‟s De Inventione, Quintilian‟s Institutio
or any modern book of rhetoric; it is to be testified in all literary or “poetic” (if you
prefer the term) works and learned from them as well. Literature, as we have said
above, aims both to instruct and to delight. To delight is to utilize language
“beautifully.” We admit that literature makes use of all rhetorical devices to make
its language effective and beautiful. But literature is effective and beautiful not just
because of its rhetoric, unless the sense of “rhetoric” is stretched to cover all literary or poetic devices.
Every piece of literature is a “composition.” To compose is to select and to combine. When we speak, we select words first and then combine the words into
phrases or sentences; we select phrases and sentences first and then combine them
into a discourse. Similarly, when we compose a literary or poetic work, we select
words first and combine them into statements next, and select statements first and
combine them into a text next. The art of speech lies in the act of selection and the
act of combination. The art of literature lies also in the acts of selection and
combination. But the art of selection and combination as applied to the making of a
speech or an utterance is primarily grammatical and rhetorical; it is usually confined
to such linguistic or rhetorical matters as related to sound and sense in words, phrases
or sentences. The art of selection and combination as applied to the making of a
literary discourse or a poetic work does not rest with such linguistic or rhetorical
matters. It often involves extra-linguistic and extra-rhetorical matters such as the
choosing of narrators, the arranging of correlated images, the establishing of styles,
the creating of thematic unity, and the use of intertextuality. A literary text is thus
not only a linguistic text; it is a social and cultural text as well, a text that selects and
combines for its own purpose all relevant, social and cultural entities involving not
just sound, shape, and sense, but also situation—all the pragmatic as well as
14phonological, visual, and semantic aspects of verbal communication.
Here we may note in passing that Jakoson‟s study of “aphasia” (speech defect) led
him from considering the vertical (selection) and horizontal (combination)
dimensions of language to assorting “the similarity disorder” as the result of inability
to select a proper linguistic element and “the contiguity disorder” as the result of inability to combine linguistic elements in a sequence. From the assortments, then,
Jakobson went on to assert that the two kinds of disorder correspond to the two 15 I rhetorical figures of speech: metaphor and metonymy. And, further on, he
do not think it very useful to adopt the two rhetorical terms for the dichotomy of suggested that normal speech tends towards either the metaphoric or the metonymic,
normal speech or aphasia, nor for the description of a literary style or movement. and literary style or even literary movement also leans towards either extreme.
But I do agree that any speech or any text may foreground or “lay bare” its strength (or weakness) on either the vertical axis of selection or the horizontal axis of
combination. And that is where the success or failure of the speaking or writing
“art” lies.
In regard to the axes of selection and combination, Jakobson has made a famous
but sometimes puzzling statement: “The poetic function projects the principle of
equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (71). This statement refers to the fact of promoting equivalence to the constitutive device of the
sequence such as the poetic convention of equalizing one syllable with any other
syllable of the same sequence. Nevertheless, this statement may also imply and
stress the fact that the poetic function, as fulfilled in a poem, manifests itself not only
in seeking the metaphoric element of similarity in the selection of individual words,
phrases, images, etc., for the poem, but also in seeking the same metaphoric element
of similarity in the combination of such words, phrases, images, etc., in the poem.
In Larkin‟s “Toads,” for instance, the poetic function is seen in both the selection of
the poem‟s verbal details and the combination of such details so that we may know
our jobs are like so many toads squatting on our life and pressing us to work on and
on with all its disgusting pressure.
Mary Louise Pratt has called the Russian Formalist postulation of poetic or
literary vs. nonpoetic or ordinary language “the „poetic language‟ fallacy,” and has had a good discussion of the topic in her Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary
Discourse. She doubts the validity of Jokobson‟s “projection principle” and the Formalist “ideas of dominance and focus on the message” as “an answer to the question Jokobson poses: „What makes a verbal message a verbal work of art?‟” (36). I also doubt the validity. I even doubt Jokobson‟s idea of attributing “poetic function” to a message predominantly focused on itself,
16 preferring the Prague Linguistic Circle‟s idea of seeing poetic function in the language‟s being “directed toward the sign itself” rather than toward “the signified.” For me, what makes