Competence to comprehend and knowledging

• Schooling and media consumption complicate the notion of communicative competence.
• How might schooling and media consumption contribute to a person’s communicative competence?
• How might we study this type of communicative competence?

Work on communicative competence (CC) has focused upon the type of CC developed in small group settings. This paper examines the types of competences that develop as part of a person’s schooling and media consumption. Involvement in these activities enables competence to comprehend others’ ways of speaking and an ability to evaluate these ways of speaking, which I refer to as “knowledging”. Where acts of knowledging are ratified as appropriate, we can say that this represents an example of CC. I use audio-video recordings of organized teledrama viewing sessions involving a group of Indonesians to show how these Indonesians comprehend and evaluate signs that have associations with particular ethnic stereotypes that they themselves do not identify with.