History of Linguistic and Cultural competence

Linguistic competence was a term coined by Noam Chomsky. It states that a speaker of a any language, may it be English, Spanish, Hindi, Arabian, etc ... must have a certain amount of knowledge to make new sentences. For example, if I say to ariels, "please bring back my elephant from the moon": a sentence that I did not learn in the past from any imaginable experience. Young children gradually pass through a series of milestones of language acquisition, from crying and cooing to babbling, to one and two word phrases, and then to more complex speech.

This ability to create a nonfunctional sentence was a great part of language-learning that Chomsky referred to. The similar course of language development across cultures and the ease with which children naturally acquire language suggest that language depends on an instinctive mechanism that may be pre-recorded in the human brain. Noam Chomsky called this mechanism the language acquisition device. Children learn to use the rules of grammar without any formal instruction. In English-speaking cultures, they begin placing the subject before the verb long before they learn what the terms subject and verb mean. According to Chomsky, children are able to learn grammatical structures as rapidly and easily as they do because the human brain contains the basic blue prints or neural circuitry for using grammar.

Many critics point out that Chomsky's language acquisition device is not an actual physical structure in the brain, but only a hypothesis. It is an abstract concept of how language centers in the brain work and it does not explain the mechanisms by which language is produced. A great critic was B.F. Skinner. In Skinner's book Verbal Behavior (1957), he believed language was learned through a process of reinforcement of correctly-constructed sentences.

Regardless of the exact mechanisms involved in the development of language, there is little issue that both nature and nurture are essential parts. Human's ability to develop language not only depends on the biological capacity for language production, but also on experience with sounds, meanings, and structures of human speech.

Modern World Settings

Cultural Competence is a group of similar behaviors, attitudes, and policies that come together in a structure to help professional to act together cross-culturally. Cultural and linguistic competence recommends that health care providers and health care organizations to be fully aware of the cultural and linguistic needs brought by patients of different cultures.

Example: An elderly Bosnian woman being admitted with terminal cancer may present the following challenges for health care staff and organizations: she and her family do not read, speak or understand English; her Muslim faith requires modesty during physical examinations; and her family may have cultural reasons for not discussing end-of-life concerns or her impending death. A culturally and linguistically appropriate response could include interpreter staff; translated written materials; sensitive discussions about treatment consent and advance directive forms; clinical and support staff who know to ask about and negotiate cultural issues; appropriate food choices; and other measures. (http://www.diversityrx.org/HTML/RCPROJ.htm)

Sources include: Concepts and Applications by Jeffrey S. Nevid, www.psybox.com/web_dictionary/lingcompet.htm, www.ahrq.gov/about/cods/cultcomp.htm, and http://www.diversityrx.org/HTML/RCPROJ.htm