communicative competence

The ability to communicate with another person about the whole range of everyday situations and events. In foreign language teaching, this emphasis led to courses being based principally on contemporary spoken and written language about topics such as shopping, travel, leisure, and family life. In examinations, it produced marking schemes where more of the marks were given for oral and written fluency.

Chomsky's view of linguistic competence, however, was not intended to inform pedagogy, but serve as part of developing a theory of the linguistic system itself, idealized as the abstract language knowledge of the monolingual adult native speaker, and distinct from how they happen to use and experience language.

According to a 1980 paper by Canale and Swain which has become canonical in applied linguistics, communicative competence consists of four components:

grammatical competence: words and rules
sociolinguistic competence: appropriateness
discourse competence: cohesion and coherence
strategic competence: appropriate use of communication strategies

A more recent survey of communicative competence by Bachman (1990) divides it into the broad headings of "organizational competence," which includes both grammatical and discourse (or textual) competence, and "pragmatic competence," which includes both sociolinguistic and "illocutionary" competence.

Through the influence of communicative language teaching, it has become widely accepted that communicative competence should be the goal of language education, central to good classroom practice (e.g. The understanding of communicative competence has been influenced by the field of pragmatics and the philosophy of language concerning speech acts as described in large part by John Searle and J.L.