Communicative competence

So performance depends on competence, what what does competence

depend on? According to the Chomskyan view, competence means
grammatical competence, the knowledge of grammar of an ideal speaker.
This may be called the formalist view. It contrast with the functionalist
approach, associated with pragmatics and sociolinguistics, according to
which competence suggests all the abilities of an actual speaker (Hymes,
1972). Competence is communicative competence, the ability to perform.
As Corder says (1973: 92):
It is just as much a matter of ‘competence’ in language to be able to
produce appropriate utterances as grammatical ones… The learner must
but he must... develop the ability to produce and understand
grammatical utterances… but he must also know when to select a
particular grammatical sequence, the one which is appropriate to the
context, both linguistic and situational.
The selection of the appropriate sequence depends on a knowledge of
‘speaking rules’ prevalent in the culture or language community. These
rules are sociolinguistic and discoursal: they ensure social acceptability,
one the one hand, and discourse coherence, on the other (Canale and
Swain, 1980)
Since communicative competence includes discourse competence, the
notion of fluency must be added to the abilities of an actual speaker.
According to Stubbs, fluency is the ability to handle connected discourse
in real time without prior rehearsal; it is the ability to
improvise, maintain continuity in speech and comprehension, respond
immediately to unexpected utterances, make rapid changes of topic and
speaker, and so on.
(Stubbs 1983: 36)
Thus communicative competence is a highly complex ability. It includes
grammatical accuracy, intelligibility and acceptability, contextual
appropriateness and fluency. It is far more than the grammatical