Dell Hymes's Construct of "Communicative Competence"

Dell Hymes's construct of communicative competence had its theoretical origin in the convergence of two significant developments in US linguistics that roughly co-occurred just before and after 1960: Noam Chomsky's transformational generative grammar, and Hymes and John Gumperz's ethnography of communication. That June conference had been preceded in the fall of 1965 by a small invitational conference sponsored by the federal Office of Education to brainstorm needed research on how the language of "disadvantaged" children might be implicated in their school success or failure. A focus on individual knowledge—so useful in education—entails evidence about variation in the share of the systemic potential particular individuals actually command. In Hymes's words, underlined in the original, "There is a fundamental difference between what is not said, because there is no occasion to say it, and what is not said, because one does not have a way to say it".