communicative competence

Posted by Clover on March 22nd, 2017

Having no language, infants cannot be told what they need to learn．Yet by the age of three they will have mastered the basic structure of their native language and will be well on their way to communicative competence ．Acquiring their language is a most impressive intellectual feat．Students of how children learn language generally agree that the most remarkable aspect of this feat is the rapid acquisition of grammar．Nevertheless, the ability of children to conform to grammatical rules is only slightly more wonderful than their ability to learn words．It has been reckoned that the average high school graduate in the United States has a reading vocabulary of 80000 words, which includes idiomatic expressions and proper names of people and places．This vocabulary must have been learned over a period of 16 years．From the figures, it can be calculated that the average child learns at a rate of about 13 new words per day．Clearly a learning process of great complexity goes on at a rapid rate in children．