The other way around: from performance to competence in second language acquisition

Performance is an individual (and therefore a self-organized) phenomenon “because it is the dynamic properties of the system that lead it to happen, not some external organizing force” (Larsen-Freeman and Cameron 2008: 58). As a result, there can only be heterogeneity in the classroom. By focusing on performance, the language teacher should lead learners to achieve linguistic, semantic and pragmatic competences in the permanent development of a language. This implies that the central core of an approach to language teaching and learning is no longer the competence to achieve performance-as it has happened to approaches to language teaching so far-but the other way around. This work aims at discussing how complexity theory has helped applied linguists to overcome the competence-performance dichotomy in second language acquisition.