Linguistic Models for Educational Development: Appraising the Competence and Performance Theory

The development of a people is the essence of national transformation. Indeed, it is in individuals, who are the major constituents of a nation, that we find the root of whatever aspect of transformation for a nation. Individual development therefore is the concern of this paper. The focus is on individuals being transformed intellectually, morally and character-wise. The teacher is made and identified as the performer of this task of transformation. This is restricted to the teacher's appropriate use of language, especially in a classroom situation. The discussion is captured within the frameworks of Linguistic Competence and Performance  as introduced by Noam Chomsky, and Dell Hymes' Communicative Competence, each of which, in its way, defines how an individual possesses and uses language accurately and properly. At the end of the discourse, what we have holistically is that teachers should have a good knowledge of sentence construction and usage, to avoid distractions and misunderstanding, just as they should be careful and wise in their choice of words to be able to transform the character and general philosophy of the learners under them. This is proven to have positive implications on national transformation.