According to Chomsky, competence refers to a language user’s underlying knowledge about the linguistic system of the rules. When we talk about it, the speaker is an ideal speaker. It is someone who has a complete knowledge of the language, has the ability to create and understand sentences, even the sentence they had never heard before. One’s competence is insensible and is an abstract conception.

Performance refers to the actual use of language in concrete situations. It is sensible and is the actual use of the language by individuals in speech and writing. It is sensible, in other words, others can see and know how the person act or express.

    In my opinion, competence and performance, they are all linguistic abilities. However, they are much different from each other. Competence is the ability to use the language, while performance is how people use language. With linguistic competence, we can form sentences by joining sentences and phases together or adding modifiers to a noun, as long as we can. We have the ability to speak due to competence. While performance requires people make their speech or writings more attractive, they should have different methods to speak and express. When they are in different situations, they will perform differently. In addition, they shall pay attention to how they perform, it depends on the roles they play in conversations.

As a teacher, it is quite important to have both competence and performance. For many of the teachers, they are equipped with abundant professional knowledge. As speakers of the language, they are professional and have great linguistic competence. While in the class, they are not just speakers, the most important role for them is: teacher. Then they should act as teachers and impart knowledge in a proper manner, but not just tell the knowledge. The act of telling can be done by everyone who majors in the language or studies it, a translator, an interpreter or just a language learner, etc. 

     I do think it will be much easier for a teacher to develop linguistic rather than try it for level of performance. But we need to pay attention to it. E.g. when we are having linguistic class, the teacher doesn’t only tell us the deep knowledge, but also gives us a lot of examples to get us understand it. Another example, when I learnt the word” Christmas” in middle school. The teacher told us a story about Christmas and taught us some more words. She wouldn’t just tell us how to spell and write the words, she thought of ways to make the word impressive for us. This is linguistic performance for a teacher in teaching.