As I was reading through the chapter, these two terms really drew my attention. Communicative competence is “what a speaker needs to know to communicate appropriately within a particular language community” (100). And that language community refers to a group of people who share knowledge of a common language to at least some extent. As I have said before, I am a Bilingual educator major and language community is a huge part of the acculturation process in immigrants coming from their home country to the US.
Acculturation is the full participation of learning the culture of that community and adapting to those values and behavioral problems. Although the notion of acculturation sounds amazing, it is not easy to do as an immigrant coming from the US. The immigrant already has morals and values that they live by and then have to acculturate themselves to adapt to the values of the US and the culture of the community. However, some immigrants find it difficult to acculturate and turn to assimilation. Assimilating is basically, “trying to fit in to get by.” Moreover, assimilation is not the key and that is where Bilingual education classes come into play. On page 127, Saville-Troike differentiate between the types of bilingualism. Additive bilingualism is where members of a dominant group learn the language of a subordinate group without threat to their L1 competence or to their ethnic identity. The other is subtractive bilingualism, where members of a subordinate group learn the dominant language as L2 and are more likely to experience some less of ethnic identity and of their L1 skills. The more additive bilingualism occurs in education, the more people will acculturate, rather than assimilate.
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