COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE:

Our main objective, as foreign language teachers, must not be to teach a

language but to teach students to communicate in that foreign language. This
means providing them with a communicative competence. This concept was
first formulated by Dell Hymes in the mid-sixties, and deeply theorised in On
Communicative Competence (in Pride, J & Holmes, J. (eds) (1972):
Sociolinguistics: Selected Readings: Harmondsworth: Penguin. It refers to the
knowledge and the capacity of language use in a social setting. Language
competence alone (grammar, vocabulary, phonetics, etc.), as described by
Chomsky in his book of 1957: Syntactic Structures, is not enough to achieve the
speakers or the receivers communicative aim. Hymes distinguished 4 aspects
of this competence: systematic potential, appropriacy, occurrence and
feasibility. These 4 competences have been adapted over the years for teaching
purposes.
As is explained in the R.D. 126/2014 of 28 th of February of the MEC and in the
D.108/2014 of 4th of July of the VG, which follow Canale and Swains approach,
apart from the grammatical competence, communicative competence also
involves:
-

The knowledge of how language is organised as discourse (discourse

competence).
The ability to adapt the linguistic performance to the situation, according
to the social rules and habits (socio-linguistic competence).
The knowledge of how to access and use extra-linguistic resources
(context interpretation, gestures, etc.) to achieve the communicative
objective (strategic competence).
And the knowledge which allows one to interpret the elements of the
social and cultural reality transmitted or referred to by language (sociocultural competence).