Communicative language competences

Canale and Swain (1980), Canale (1983)

Four components of Communicative Competence 

1. grammatical competenceconcerned with mastery of the language code itself

2. discourse competence
concerns mastery of how to combine grammatical forms and meanings to achieve a unified spoken or written text in different genres

3. sociolinguistic competence
addresses the extent to which utterances are produced and understood appropriately in different sociolinguistic contexts depending on contextual factors

4. strategic competence
is composed of mastery of verbal and non-verbal communication strategies that may be called into action for two main reasons: (a) to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to limiting conditions in actual communication or to insufficient competence in one or more of the other areas of communicative competence; and (b) to enhance the effectiveness of communication

The Common European Framework

Communicative language competences

For the realisation of communicative intentions, users/learners bring to bear their

general capacities as detailed above together with a more specifically language-related

communicative competence. Communicative competence in this narrower sense has the

following components:

linguistic competences

- lexical competence

- grammatical competence

- semantic competence

- phonological competence

- Orthographic competence

- Orthoepic competence

sociolinguistic competences

Sociolinguistic competence is concerned with the knowledge and skills required to deal 

with the social dimension of language use. As was remarked with regard to sociocultural 

competence, since language is a sociocultural phenomenon, much of what is contained 

in the Framework, particularly in respect of the sociocultural, is of relevance to 

sociolinguistic competence. The matters treated here are those specifically relating to 

language use and not dealt with elsewhere: 

- Linguistic markers of social relations

- Politeness 

conventions

- Expressions of folk-wisdom

- Register differences

- Dialect and 

accent

pragmatic competences

Pragmatic competences are concerned with the user/learner’s knowledge of the principles

according to which messages are:

a) organised, structured and arranged (‘discourse competence’);

b) used to perform communicative functions (‘functional competence’);

c) sequenced according to interactional and transactional schemata (‘designcompetence’).

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