The Construct Validation of Some Components of Communicative Proficiency

The notion of communicative competence has received wide attention in the past few years, and numerous attempts have been made to define it. Canale and Swain (1980) have reviewed these attempts and have developed a framework which defines several hypothesized components of communicative competence and makes the implicit claim that tests of components of communicative competence measure different abilities. In this study we examine the construct validity of some tests of components communicative competence and of a hypothesized model. Three distinct traits—linguistic competence, pragmatic competence and sociolinguistic competence—were posited as components of communicative competence. A multitrait-multimethod design was used, in which each of the three hypothesized traits was tested using four methods: an oral interview, a writing sample, a multiple-choice test and a self-rating. The subjects were 116 adult non-native speakers of English from various language and language-learning backgrounds. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to examine the plausibility of several causal models, involving from one to three trait factors. The results indicate that the model which best fits the data includes a general and two specific trait factors —grammatical/pragmatic competence and sociolinguistic competence. The relative importance of the trait and method factors in the various tests used is also indicated.