The sociolinguistic competence in English of first-year students at Vista University (Soweto)

Abstract

There is general agreement amongst linguistic theorists and language practitioners that the second language learner's proficiency has to be understood in terms of communicative competence. Such proficiency is generally regarded as a multidimensional construct comprised of several distinct, but interrelated and interacting, abilities or competencies. one such ability relates to the sociolinguistic dimension of language use. The purpose of this study was to investigate the sociolinguistic competence in English of a group of first-year students of English at Vista University {Soweto), focusing on performance of the apology, request and condolence speech acts. The investigation entailed a study of the relevant literature as well as an empirical study. In the former, the various theoretical developments tied to the notion of communicative competence were outlined, and the different abilities, subsumed under such competence, were then distinguished and defined with reference to the relevant literature. The empirical component of the study involved administering a questionnaire-type test to two groups of first-year university students of English: 21 ESL students from Vista University {Soweto) and 21 first language {L1) speakers of English from the Rand Afrikaans University. The latter served as a the norm for first language speaker patterns. The data were analyzed using ,the analytical frameworks employed 1n the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Patterns (CCSARP) project. A modified version of the same framework was adapted for analysis of the condolence speech act responses. A three-point scale was used to score the responses, and the practical significance of the differences observed was also detected by means of statistical processing of the scores. The results indicated that there were deviations from Ll speaker norms in the speech act performance of the ESL subjects. The observed deviations were in the main ascribable to sociolinguistic violations although there were cases were grammatical inadequacies contributed to deviant utterances. As a result of these deviations and violations the level of performance of the ESL group was lower than that of the Ll group. There were indications, therefore, that some of the subjects in the ESL speaker group did not have adequate proficiency in respect of certain aspects of the sociolinguistic dimension of language use. The differences in speech act performance between the Ll and the ESL speakers were also found to be practically significant.