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COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE
Russell (1981) says: “I take the communicative competence of 
normal people to be acquired in the course of social experience and to 
reflect their psychological needs” (Russell 1981). This concept means 
that people’s utterances will express social and psychological messages 
as well as referential meaning. 

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He also says: “I take communicative competence to include 
capability for use necessarily includes knowledge of what is linguistically 
appropriate for any given context”. For instance, this concept does move 
apart from Chomsky’s original notion of competence and adds a new 
perspective or twist to it.
We must remark that Chomsky (1965) states that ‘competence’ is 
a technical term within transformational-generative grammar to mean a 
hypothetical 
monolingual 
native-speaker’s 
tacit 
knowledge 
of 
grammaticality. To remark this difference some linguists have with 
Chomsky’s theories we can refer to Le Page (1973) who describes 
competence in his way (which he claims is not the same as Chomsky’s) 
as a quality or resource that consists in having available a code, and the 
knowledge of how and in what contexts to use that code. 
Communicative competence itself divides into four major components as 
described in the next table stated by Canale and Swain (1980).
Communicative Competence
1. Grammatical competence: words and rules
2. Sociolinguistic competence: appropriateness.
3. Discourse competence: cohesion and coherence.
4. Strategic competence: appropriate use of communication strategies.

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Grammatical competence
Grammatical competence can be seen as the ability to recognize 
and produce the distinctive grammatical structures of a language and to 
use them effectively in communication. 
In addition to the concept presented above grammatical 
competence comprises knowledge of vocabulary, syntax, morphology 
and phonology/graphology (Bachman 1990). For example, a person 
needs to arrange words in a correct order in a sentence with appropriate 
endings (e.g. high, higher, or highest).