When we reflect on the purpose of oral language practice or of any language practice for that matter we are mid-debate between opposing schemata for envisioning what we are doing, schemata that derive from two revered epistemological and psychological traditions. On the one hand we can view speaking as rule-governed creativity that reflects what Chomsky calls competence. The speaker's competence is itself unobservable but "psychologically real," a mental grammar best researched at the de-contextualized level of the intrapersonal utterance, usually the sentence. This is the so-called rationalist schema associated with Chomsky (1965). On the other hand, an alternative, empiricist schema looks at speaking as a set of descriptive, and thus observable, habits conditioned by social and functional rules or contexts. Appropriate interpretation and conveyance of interpersonal messages in particular context constitute a communicative competence (Hymes 1972).