ES competencia discursiva / CAT competència discursiva / FR compétence discursive / DE diskursive Kompetenz

Discourse competence is a plurilingual ability that implies being able to handle sociocultural, pragmatic, and textual pieces of knowledge (concepts and skills) effectively, appropriately, and with a critical attitude when producing and interpreting every particular discourse genre, in relation to the genre colony to which it belongs. Therefore, it is a multidimensional skill exhibiting three basic dimensions:

• the sociocultural dimension, the most all-encompassing one, which involves being able to recognize critically a discourse's aims and interests as well as the social and cultural power it confers, and being able to react to them;
• the pragmatic dimension, which involves being able to relate a discourse to the participants, their intentions, their place and time;
• and the textual dimension, which involves knowing how a discourse is structured and how its characteristic linguistic exponents (grammar and vocabulary) are used to serve a particular social, cultural, and pragmatic function.

Discursive competence has traditionally been considered a subcompetence (Hymes 1971, van Ek 1986, Canale 1983, Celce-Murcia 2007) within communicative competence, along with linguistic, pragmatic, sociolinguistic, intercultural, plurilingual or strategic competences. So discursive competence is defined as the knowledge and skills required to produce and interpret texts considering their structural scheme and the linguistic standards of the different discourse genres that we use.

A particular individual may exhibit gaps in their degrees of receptive and productive discursive competences. Depending on the type of communicative activity required in each situation and social frame, such gaps in discursive competence have clear consequences didactically: depending on the text type, interaction will require a learner to practice the "receptive" competence, the "productive" competence, or both. In that sense, discursive competence is intrinsically plurilingual, since the student already knows how to use some discourse genres thanks to their previous experiences in their additional (already mastered) languages. Therefore, discursive competence implies the development of both plurilingual and pluricultural competences (Consejo de Europa 2008).

References

• Canale, Michael (1983). “From communicative competence to communicative language pedagogy”. En Jack C. Richards y Richard W. Schmidt (Eds.), Language and Communication, 2–27. Londres: Longman.
• Celce-Murcia, Marianne. 2007. “Rethinking the Role of Communicative Competence in Language Teaching”. En Eva Alcón Soler y Maria Pilar Safont Jordà (Eds.), Intercultural Language Use and Language Learning, 41–57. Dordrecht: Springer.
• Consejo de Europa (2008). MAREP. Marco de Referencia para los Enfoques Plurales de las Lenguas y de las Culturas. Estrasburgo: European Centre for Modern Languages / Consejo de Europa.
• Hymes, Dell H. (1971). “On Communicative Competence”. En J. B. Pride y J. Holmes (Eds.) (1972), Sociolinguistics: Selected readings, 269-293. Baltimore, USA: Penguin Education, Penguin Books Ltd. [Traducción al español en «Acerca de la competencia comunicativa».  En Llobera, M. et al. (1995). Competencia comunicativa. Documentos básicos en la enseñanza de lenguas extranjeras. Madrid: Edelsa, 27-47].