ppropriateness". Hymes (1980, p.49) argued that "appropriateness" was a "universal of speech", related to the social codes of speech communities, what he refers to (p.42) as "shared understandings of rights and duties , norms of interactions, grounds of authority, and the like. "For Hymes, communication is" pre-structured by the history and ways of those among whom one inquires. "(p.74) Learning to communicate" appropriately " ; has sometimes been taken to imply learning to fit into a particular way of communicating in a target community. Learning might, for example, have focused among other things on the appropriate use of speech acts as social functions used in particular speech communities, such as how to give and receive invitations or how to apologize. Students 'own norms would then be seen as inappropriate, interfering with successful communication in a target culture.is not new for teachers to challenge this view when carried to extremes, resulting in unconscious cultural imperialism in the very situations where the opposite is intended. In 1984, for example, I found myself in the unreal situation of being required to teach the kind of indirect requests to Bedouin Arab students I could never remember using myself during my Northern English upbringing, but which we British were thought to use, such as , "I wonder if you could direct me to the station?" This approach may have been and may still be justifiable, for example, in language schools where students are learning English in Britain to use in Britain or for professional training. However, in the more varied and unpredictable contexts in which many students will use English in this new century, it is clearly inappropriate to teach language that is only appropriate in limited situations in a target culture that may never be visited by the students. What constitutes making an "appropriate" contribution in international communication cannot be defined in terms of a single speech community and there is no such thing as a global speech community in any definable sense.already available for more than twenty years has not neglected the kind of competences needed for international communication. Canale and Swain's (1980) and Canale's (1983) four-part framework included linguistic, socio-linguistic, discourse and strategic competences. Bachman (1990) and Bachman and Palmer (1996) include grammatical competence, which encompasses vocabulary, syntax morphology and phonemes/graphemes (See Skehan 1998, pp. 157-164 for a full discussion). In this discussion we can identify an important distinction between what we could term linguistic knowledge and abilities which enable us to better apply or compensate for lacunae in linguistic abilities. (See Kasper and Kellerman, 1997). p align="justify"> Applying linguistic competence involves the activation of a body of knowledge that has been learned and stored in memory for retrieval. Performance will never reflect the full body of k...
