Communicative Competence
Grammar is not enough. So what else is there?
Communicative competence is the knowledge and ability that let someone use a language appropriately and effectively in real social situations, not just produce grammatical sentences.
A learner in Đà Nẵng can conjugate every verb in the textbook, yet she emails a visiting professor: Give me your slides. Nothing in the sentence is ungrammatical, but something has clearly gone wrong. Noam Chomsky (1965) had defined linguistic competence as the unconscious grammatical knowledge of an ideal speaker-listener in a uniform community, setting actual use aside as performance.
The linguistic anthropologist Dell Hymes objected that such a theory leaves out what every child acquires: knowing when to speak and when to stay silent, and what to say to whom, where and how. His communicative competence asks four questions of any utterance: is it formally possible, is it feasible, is it appropriate in its context, and is it actually done? Hymes was writing as an anthropologist studying how communities use language, not as a syllabus designer.
Applied linguists soon adapted the idea for teaching and testing. Michael Canale and Merrill Swain (1980) proposed grammatical, sociolinguistic and strategic competence, the last being the strategies speakers use to compensate when communication breaks down. Canale (1983) then separated out discourse competence, the ability to combine forms and meanings into cohesive, coherent text. Later models, including Bachman’s (1990) communicative language ability and the five-part framework of Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei and Thurrell (1995), redrew the components. Constant Leung (2005) warns that ELT often turned Hymes’s ethnographic idea into idealised native-speaker rules of use, a concern sharpened by research on English as a lingua franca. Even so, the concept gave communicative language teaching its goal: learners who can get things done with a language, appropriately.
In actionGrammar runs out, competence doesn’t
- S
- Excuse me, teacher. Do you have the… the small machine that joins papers together?
- T
- A stapler?
- S
- Yes! Could I borrow your stapler, please?
- T
- Of course. Here you are.
The learner lacks a word but keeps the talk going by describing the object (strategic competence), then reformulates a polite request suited to speaking to a teacher (sociolinguistic competence).
In the classroom
- 1
Contrast two versions of one request, such as Give me your slides and Could I possibly have a copy of your slides?, and have learners decide who could say each to whom, and why.
- 2
Run a circumlocution game in which learners describe everyday objects without naming them (It’s a thing you use to…), practising the strategic competence that keeps talk alive when words run out.
- 3
Add bands for appropriacy, coherence and repair strategies to your speaking rubrics, so that learners see that accuracy is one part of communicative competence, not the whole of it.
Myth and reality
Communicative competence means valuing fluency instead of grammar.
Every major model includes grammatical or linguistic competence as a component. The claim is that grammar is necessary but not sufficient: learners also need to know what is appropriate, how to build discourse and how to rescue communication.
Reflect
Whose norms of appropriateness do your speaking tasks reward, and are they the norms your students will actually need when they use English?
Worth a minute before your next lesson, or a conversation in the staffroom.
SourcesChecked against Crossref and library records
Hymes first presented the idea at a 1966 conference on the language development of disadvantaged children, in reaction to Chomsky’s (1965) competence–performance distinction; this 1972 version is the one most often cited. Canale and Swain (1980) and Canale (1983) turned it into the model most familiar to language teachers.
Hymes, D. (1972). On communicative competence. In J. B. Pride & J. Holmes (Eds.), Sociolinguistics: Selected readings (pp. 269–293). Penguin.
Canale, M., & Swain, M. (1980). Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics, 1(1), 1–47.
The founding applied-linguistics model of grammatical, sociolinguistic and strategic competence, and still the reference point for communicative syllabuses and tests.
Celce-Murcia, M., Dörnyei, Z., & Thurrell, S. (1995). Communicative competence: A pedagogically motivated model with content specifications. Issues in Applied Linguistics, 6(2), 5–35.
A five-part model built for teachers, with concrete content lists for each competence; open access.
Celce-Murcia, M. (2007). Rethinking the role of communicative competence in language teaching. In E. Alcón Soler & M. P. Safont Jordà (Eds.), Intercultural language use and language learning (pp. 41–57). Springer.
Revises the 1995 model into six components, adding formulaic competence (fixed chunks) and folding actional competence into a broader interactional competence.
Leung, C. (2005). Convivial communication: Recontextualizing communicative competence. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 15(2), 119–144.
A sharp critique of how ELT turned Hymes’s idea into idealised native-speaker norms, and a case for reconnecting it with real-world use.
ConnectionsSee it in the graph
- English as a Lingua Francanot yet writtenQuestions whose norms of appropriate use communicative competence should be measured against.
- Communicative Language Teachingnot yet writtenCLT takes communicative competence as the goal of teaching.
- Task-Based Language TeachingTasks ask learners to use language to get things done, not just display forms.
- Native-Speakerismnot yet writtenIdealised native-speaker norms crept into many classroom versions of the concept.
- Epistemic Status and Epistemic StanceMarking certainty appropriately is one fine-grained part of knowing how to use a language.
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