3. What is a Competency? What are Subject-Specific Competencies?
What is a Competency?
A competency is the context-specific capacity to carry out observable and measurable combinations of behaviours, skills and abilities. A level of competency indicates the degree to which a learner has progressed through various stages of competency development within a given subject or sector.
The 3 Subject-Specific Competencies
English as a Second Language learning builds and reinforces the four basic language competencies: speaking, listening, reading and writing. The ESL competencies are linked to spoken and written communication and have been organized into three Subject-Specific Competencies.
- Competency 1: Interacts orally in English
- Competency 2: Reinvests understanding of texts
- Competency 3: Writes and produces texts
C1 focuses on learning to communicate orally in English (speaking). C2 builds the ability to understand a variety of English texts, along with demonstrating text comprehension in a reinvestment task (listening, reading). C3 targets developing communication in writing. Since the competencies work in synergy, the action competencies (speaking and writing) depend upon the springboard effect of the reinvestment competencies (listening and reading) to create the platform of essential elements needed for development and evaluation.
Detailed information on the ESL Competencies can be found in the Program of Study (pages 17-33).
C1: Interacts orally in English
A concise definition of C1 is how someone speaks. A learner demonstrates the speaking communication process by his ability to orally transfer messages of common intent throughout a flow of communication between the sender (learner) and the receiver (teacher and/or others). The evaluator assesses how a learner applies the communication process during the course of an oral interaction.
C2: Reinvests understanding of texts
More than simply text comprehension, C2 involves discerning to what extent a learner has been able to re-use and adapt what they have decoded and assimilated from written or spoken texts. The viable and observable end-products of the learner’s response process are speaking (thinking in sound) and writing (thinking in ink). The evaluater uses these end-products to guage how targeted information has been taken in, interpreted, shaped and re-used within a specified situaton.
C3: Writes and produces texts
Similarly to CI, there is a concise definition of C3; how someone writes. A learner demonstrates the written communication process by his ability to use the medium of writing to convey ideas and information between the sender (learner) and the receiver (teacher and/or others). The evaluator assesses how a learner applies the communication process within the concrete written form of documented evidence.
