Being competent means to be able to do something successfully or efficiently like

actors when they make us believe the role they are playing and forget the person
behind or painters, composers, and dancers when they introduce us to new forms of
beauty. But, when could we say a speaker is competent?
The aim of the chosen topic number 4 Communicative competence: Analysis of its
components is to offer a broad account of the concept of communicative
competence and this presentation will start by offering the most relevant definitions of
the concept with emphasis on the terms competence, ability and performance. Then,
models of communicative competence will be presented analyzing their components
with special attention to the most relevant and current one proposed by the Common
European Framework of Reference. Finally, a conclusion will be offered and
bibliographical notes will be presented.
Communicative Competence
Overview
The term communicative competence is comprised of two words, the combination of
which means competence to communicate. Competence is one of the most
controversial terms in the field of general and applied linguistics. Its introduction to
linguistic discourse has been generally associated with Chomsky who, in his very
influential book Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, drew what has been today viewed
as a classic distinction between competence (the monolingual speaker-listeners
knowledge of language) and performance (the actual use of language in real
situations). He describes competence as an idealized capacity that is located as a
psychological or mental property or function and performance as the production of

actual utterances. In short, competence involves knowing the language and

performance involves doing something with language.
Soon after Chomsky, the linguist Hymes (1972) defined communicative competence
not only as an inherent grammatical competence but also as the ability to use
grammatical competence in a variety of communicative situations. It is competence
of language use appropriate to the other participants of the communicative
interaction and appropriate to the given social context and situation.
Later on, Canale and Swain (1980) and understood communicative competence as a
synthesis of an underlying system of knowledge and skill needed for communication.
In their concept of communicative competence, knowledge refers to the conscious or
unconscious knowledge of an individual about language and about other aspects of
language use. According to them, there are three types of knowledge: knowledge of
underlying grammatical principles, knowledge of how to use language in a social
context in order to fulfill communicative functions and knowledge of how to combine
utterances and communicative functions with respect to discourse principles. In
addition, their concept of skill refers to how an individual can use the knowledge in
actual communication. According to Canale (1983), skill requires a further distinction
between underlying capacity and its manifestation in real communication, that is to
say, in performance.
According to many other theoreticians, Bachman and Palmer, 1996 for example,
affirmed that the nature of communicative competence is not static but dynamic; it is
more interpersonal than intrapersonal and relative rather than absolute. It is also
largely defined by context. In this respect Bachman (1990) suggested using the term

communicative language ability, claiming that this term combines in itself the
meanings of both language proficiency and communicative competence.

Models of the communicative competence

Recent theoretical and empirical research on communicative competence is largely
based on three models of communicative competence: the model of Canale and
Swain, the model of Bachman and Palmer and the description of components of
communicative language competence in the Common European Framework of
Reference (CEFR further use in this presentation).
1. The theoretical model which was proposed by Canale and Swain (1980, 1981) had
at first three main components on the fields of knowledge and skills: grammatical,
sociolinguistic and strategic competence. In a later version of this model, Canale
(1983, 1984) transferred some elements from sociolinguistic competence into the
fourth component which he named discourse competence.
According to Canale and Swain, grammatical competence is concerned with
mastery of the linguistic code (verbal or non-verbal) which includes vocabulary
knowledge as well as knowledge of morphological, syntactic, semantic, phonetic
and orthographic rules. This competence enables the speaker to use knowledge
and skills needed for understanding and expressing the literal meaning of
utterances.
Canale (1983, 1984) described discourse competence as mastery of rules that
determine ways in which forms and meanings are combined to achieve cohesion
by the use of devices (e.g. pronouns, conjunctions, synonyms, parallel structures
etc.) which help to link individual sentences and utterances to a structural whole.
The means for achieving coherence, for instance repetition, progression,
3

consistency, relevance of ideas etc., enable the organisation of meaning

establishing a logical relationship between groups of utterances.
Strategic competence is composed of knowledge of verbal and non-verbal
communication strategies that are recalled to compensate for breakdowns in
communication due to insufficient competence in one or more components of
communicative

competence.

These

strategies

include

paraphrase,

circumlocution, repetition, reluctance, avoidance of words, structures or themes,

guessing, changes of register and style, modifications of messages etc.
The sociolinguistic competence in their model includes knowledge of rules and
conventions which underlie the appropriate comprehension and language use in
different sociolinguistic and sociocultural contexts.
2. According to Bachman and Palmer (1996), many traits of language users such as
some general characteristics, their topical knowledge, affective scheme and
language ability influence the communicative language ability. The crucial
characteristic is their language ability which is comprised of two broad areas
language knowledge and strategic competence.
Language knowledge consists of two main components organizational
knowledge and pragmatic knowledge which complement each other in achieving
communicatively effective language use.
In Bachman and Palmers model, organisational knowledge is composed of
abilities engaged in a control over formal language structures, of grammatical and
textual knowledge.
Grammatical knowledge includes several rather independent areas of knowledge
such as knowledge of vocabulary, morphology, syntax, phonology, and graphology.
They enable recognition and production of grammatically correct sentences as well
as comprehension of their propositional content. Textual knowledge enables
4

comprehension and production of spoken or written texts. It covers the knowledge of

conventions for combining sentences or utterances into texts, cohesion, and
knowledge of rhetorical organisation (way of developing narrative texts, descriptions,
comparisons, classifications etc.) or conversational organization (conventions for
initiating, maintaining and closing conversations).
Pragmatic knowledge in their model refers to abilities for creating and interpreting
discourse. It includes two areas of knowledge: knowledge of pragmatic conventions
for expressing acceptable language functions and for interpreting the illocutionary
power of utterances or discourse (functional knowledge) and knowledge of
sociolinguistic conventions for creating and interpreting language utterances which
are appropriate in a particular context of language use (sociolinguistic knowledge).
Strategic knowledge is conceived in the model as a set of metacognitive components
which enable language user involvement in goal setting, assessment of
communicative sources, and planning.
3. The last model I will refer to is the model of description of communicative
language competence in CEFR (2001), the model which is intended for
assessment as well as for learning and teaching of languages.
In the CEFR, communicative competence is conceived only in terms of knowledge.
It includes three basic components linguistic competence, sociolinguistic
competence and pragmatic competence. Thus, strategic competence is not its
componential part. It is interesting, however, that each component of language
knowledge is explicitly defined as knowledge of its contents and ability to apply it.
a) Linguistic competence is defined as knowledge of, and ability to use, the formal
resources from which well-formed, meaningful messages may be assembled and
5

formulated. Its subcomponents are lexical, grammatical, semantic, phonological,

orthographic and orthoepic competences.
Lexical Competence can be described as the knowledge of and ability to
recognize and use the vocabulary of a language in the way the native
speakers use them. This includes: fixed expressions (greetings, proverbs),
phrasal idioms, phrasal verbs, compound prepositions, intensifiers or frozen
metaphors. Besides, it also includes single words forms or grammatical
elements such as articles and personal pronouns.

Grammatical competence is the ability to recognize and produce the

distinctive grammar rules which consists basically of knowledge of elements
such as morpheme-roots and affixes, categories such as number, case
gender; classes as conjugations or declinations, structures as compound
and complex words; processes such as gradation or nominalization or
sciences such as morphology and word formation.

Semantic competence can be defined as the learners awareness and

control of the organization of meaning.

Phonological competence consists of a knowledge of and skill in the

perception and production of phonemes in their linguistic environment, word
stress, sentence stress, pitch and intonation.

Orthographic competence involves a knowledge of and skill in perception

of the symbols of which written texts are composed such as form of letters
in printed forms, proper spelling or punctuation marks..

Orthoepic competence has to do with the way reading aloud is produced

because it is needed to pronounce written texts in a proper way. This fact
6

may involve: knowledge of spelling spelling conventions or ability to resolve

ambiguity when facing ambiguity or syntactic ambiguities.
b) Sociolinguistic competence is the knowledge of sociocultural rules knowing how
to use and respond to language appropriately. The appropriateness depends on
the setting of the communication, the topic, register, and the relationships among
the people communicating. Moreover, being appropriate depends on knowing
what the taboos of the other culture are, what politeness indices are used in each
case, what the politically correct term would be for something, how a specific
attitude (authority, friendliness, courtesy, irony etc.) is expressed.
So, according to CEFRs model sociolinguistic competence deals with: linguistic
markers of social relations; politeness conventions; expressions of folk-wisdom;
register differences; and dialect and accent.
c) The last component in this model - pragmatic competence could be classified
into two categories: discourse competence and functional competence.
Discourse competence is the speakers ability to organize, structure and arrange
sentences in sequence so as to produce coherent chunks of meaningful language. It
includes knowledge of, and ability to, control the ordering sentences in terms of its
topic or focus, the given or new information; the cause effect and so on and so forth.
A key concept related to discourse competence is the so called co-operative
principle (Grice 1975), which states that competent speakers make their
contributions when they are required and at the stage at which they occur, by the
accepted purpose of the conversational exchange by observing the following
maxims: quality (try to make your contribution one that is true), quantity (make your

contribution as informative as necessary, but not more), relevance (do not say what is
not relevant) and manner (be brief and orderly, avoid obscurity and ambiguity).
Functional competence used to perform communicative functions is concerned
with the use of spoken discourse and written texts in communication for particular
functional purposes. A competent speaker should know how to manage the act of
communication in which each initiative leads to a response from the beginning of the
interaction to its end.
Now, at the end of my presentation, let me summing up the main points I covered.
Firstly, I defined the concept of the communicative competence and furthermore I
developed the three models of communicative competence and analyzed their
components mentioning some of the well-known researchers on the field of
linguistics, emphasizing their contributions.
This theme emerges upon the basis that language and communication are at the
heart of the human experience, and therefore the main aim is to know how to teach
our students in order to achieve to communicate effectively in a pluralistic society
focusing on the sociolinguistic and cultural aspects of language.
Several valuable sources have contributed to the realization of this presentation as
follow:
Bachman, L.F. (1990). Fundamental Considerations in Language
Testing. Oxford etc.: OUP.
Canale, M. (1983). From communicative competence to
communicative language pedagogy.
Canale, M., & Swain, M. (1981). A Theoretical Framework for
Communicative Competence. In Palmer, A., Groot, P., & Trosper, G.
8

(Eds.), The construct validation of test of communicative competence,

31-36.
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge,
Massachusetts:
Council of Europe (2001). Common European Framework of
Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching and Assessment.
Strasbourg.
Hymes, D. H. (1972). On Communicative Competence. In Pride, J. B.,
& Holmes, J. (Eds.), Sociolinguistics, 269-293. Baltimore, USA:
Penguin Education, Penguin Books Ltd.