Through practice and experience in an increasingly wide range of communicative contexts and events, learners gradually expand their communicative competence, consisting of grammatical competence, discourse competence, sociocultural competence and strategic competence. All these components are interrelated. An increase in one component interacts with other components to produce a corresponding increase in overall communicative competence.

Grammatical competence refers to sentence-level grammatical form, the ability to recognize the lexical, morphological, syntactic and phonological feature of a language and to make use of these features to interpret and form words and whole sentences. One demonstrates grammatical competence not by stating a rule but by using a rule in the interpretation, expression or negotiation of meaning.

Discourse competence is concerned not with isolated words or phrases but with the interconnectedness of a series of utterances, written words and/or phrases to build a text, a meaningful whole. Two familiar concepts to talk about discourse competence are text coherence and cohesion. Text coherence is the relation of all sentences or utterances in a text to a single global proposition. Local connections or structural links between individual sentences provide cohesion.

Sociocultural competence extends well beyond linguistic forms and is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry having to do with the social rules of language use. Sociocultural competence requires an understanding of the social context where language is used: the roles of the participants, the information they share, and the function of the interation. And although we are far from an adequate description of sociocultural rules of appropriateness, we use them to communicate successfully in many different contexts of situation. Sociocultural competence also includes a willingness to suspend judgement and take into consideration the possibility of cultural differences in convention and use. Thus the importance of the term cultural flexibility or cultural awareness.

The ‘’ideal native speaker,’’ someone who knows a language perfectly and uses it appropriately in all social interactions, exists in theory only. None of us knows all there is to know of English in its many manifestations, both around the world and in our own backyards. Communicative competence is always relative. The coping strategies we use in unfamiliar contexts, with constraints due to imperfect knowledge of rules or limiting factors in their application such as fatigue or distraction, are represented as strategic competence. With practice and experience, we gain in grammatical, discourse, and socio-cultural competence. The relative importance of strategic competence thus decreases. However, the effective use of coping strategies is important for communicative competence in all contexts and distinguishes highly competent communicators from those who are less so.

(Sandra J. Savignon. Communicative language teaching for the twenty-first century. IN: Marianne

Celce-Murcia. Teaching English as a second or foreign language. Boston, Massachusstes:

Heinle&Heinle. 3rd edition. 2002. Adaptado)