The term communicative competence

The term communicative competence

Celce-Murcia et al. (1995) divided communicative competence into five kinds:

1. Linguistic Competencies

2. Socio-cultural Competencies

3. Strategic Competencies

4. Discourse Competencies

5. Actional Competencies

Linguistic competence entails the basic elements of communication, such as sentence patterns, morphological inflections, phonological and orthographic systems, as well as lexical resources.

Socio-cultural competence refers to the speaker’s knowledge of how to express appropriate messages within the social and cultural context of communication in which they are produced.

Actional competence involves the understanding of the speakers’ communicative intent by performing and interpreting speech act sets. Finally, these four components are influenced by the last one, strategic competence, which is concerned with the knowledge of communication strategies and how to use them.

The framework of communicative competence presented by Usó Juan and Martínez Flor (2006a) includes five components which appear inside rectangular boxes of the same size, namely, discourse, linguistic pragmatic, intercultural competence and strategic.

a) Discourse competence is defined as the selection and sequencing of utterances or sentences to achieve a cohesive and coherent spoken or written text given a particular purpose and situational context.

b) Linguistic competence refers to all the elements of the linguistic system, such as aspects concerning phonology, grammar and vocabulary which are needed to interpret or produce a spoken or written text.

c) Pragmatic competence concerns the knowledge of the function or illocutionary force implied in the utterance that is intended to be understood or produced, as well as the contextual factors that affect its appropriacy.

d) Intercultural competence refers to the knowledge of how to interpret and produce a spoken or written piece of discourse within a particular socio-cultural context. Therefore, it involves knowledge of cultural factors such as the rules of behavior that exist in the target language community as well as cross-cultural awareness, including differences and similarities in cross-cultural communication.

e) Strategic competence is conceptualized as knowledge of both learning and com