Oral Communicative Competence in Classical Arabic A Reading in Linguistic Foundations

Abstract

This study provides a linguistic foundation for the concept of oral communicative competence in Modern Standard Arabic by unpacking its conceptual structure and analysing its theoretical and functional underpinnings. The article is organised around two main themes. The first focuses on clarifying the concept and its foundations by defining what oral competence is and specifying the nature of the target language, Modern Standard Arabic, as an interactive, living language. It highlights the following features: immediacy, the duality of reception and performance, contextuality, social appropriateness, and the role of non-linguistic signs in meaning. 

The second axis examines the structured linguistic bases of this competence across levels of analysis. Starting with the phonological basis, it includes the articulatory and prosodic dimensions and the role of suprasegmental phenomena in imbuing discourse with meaning. It then moves on to the morphological and syntactic bases that ensure structural well-formedness, before finally addressing the lexical/semantic basis and the pragmatic basis, which account for speech acts, interactional conventions, and the discourse context. The study concludes that oral communicative competence is an integrated system in which structural levels work in conjunction with contextual dimensions to facilitate positive communication.