What is the Difference Between Competence and Performance?

The difference between competence and performance lies in the application and implementation of knowledge and skills. Here are the key distinctions between the two concepts:

• Competence: Competence refers to the knowledge, skills, and abilities that a person possesses, which allow them to understand and use language effectively. In the context of language learning, competence is the unconscious model of the language that a person has developed in their brain, encompassing aspects such as vocabulary usage, idioms, grammar, and pronunciation. Consciously, a person accesses their competence in the form of intuition, which gives them a sense of what is correct and what is not.
• Performance: Performance is the actual use and application of competence in real-life situations or tasks. It refers to a person's ability to convert their competence into correct and coherent output. Performance can be directly limited by a person's competence, and it is influenced by factors such as context, environment, and individual factors like motivation and anxiety.

In language learning, for example, competence involves "knowing" the language, while performance involves "doing" something with the language. To identify mistakes, competence-based mistakes are errors in the underlying knowledge of the language, while performance-based mistakes are errors in the application of that knowledge in a particular context.

Comparative Table: Competence vs Performance

Here is a table illustrating the difference between competence and performance:

In summary, competence refers to the knowledge and understanding of a language or skill, while performance refers to the practical application of that knowledge and understanding in real-world situations or tasks.