ByLuis Carlos Lasso Montenegro

Communicative Competence refers to “what a speaker needs to know in order to be communicatively competent in a speech community”.

In Hymes’ view, a person who acquires communicative competence acquires both knowledge and ability for using feasible and appropriate language in relation to the situational context.

It refers to what Chomsky calls linguistic competence and involves the mastering of the linguistic code including vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, spelling and word formation.

It refers to the extent to which utterances are produced and understood appropriately in different social contexts.

It deals with the interpretation of individual message elements and is also related to the ability for combining ideas to achieve cohesion in form and coherence in thought.

It refers to the coping strategies used to start, finish, maintain or repair communication so as to overcome limitations in language knowledge.

Language Competence or linguistic Competence refers to knowledge of and ability to use language resources to form well structured messages.

The subcomponents of language competence are lexical, grammatical, semantic, phonological, orthographic and orthoepic competences.

Sociolinguistic Competence refers to possession of knowledge and skills for appropriate language use in a social context.

The aspects of this competence are: language elements that mark social relationships, rules of appropriate behavior, and expressions of peoples’ wisdom, differences in register and dialects and stress.

Pragmatic competence involves two subcomponents:

Discourse competence is the ability of a user/learner to arrange sentences in sequence so as to produce coherent stretches of language.

Functional competence is concerned with the use of spoken discourse and written texts in communication for particular functional purposes.

Richards, J. C., & Rodgers, T. S. (1986). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Council of Europe. Language Policy Unit. Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Cambridge University Press. (2001).