Communicative Competence Many linguists have defined the term of communicative competence, for example: Dell Hymes referred

to communicative competence as that aspect of our competence that enables us to convey and interpret messages and to negotiate meanings interpersonally within specific contexts. We know that does not matter how the intelligence of the person is, because sometimes the person can be intelligent at the moment to understand or analyze problems or some kind of in formations, but he or she does not the capacity to share, to speak in a comprehensive and understandable way what he/she is thinking and wants to say. In other hand, the linguist James Cummins proposed a distinction between Cognitive /academic language proficiency (CALP) and basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS). CALP (Cognitive / academic language proficiency a language-related term which refers to formal academic learning. used to discuss the language proficiency levels of students who are in the process of acquiring a new language. Communicative competence involves the ability to function in a truly communicative setting. It is like a dynamic interpersonal trait that involves two or more persons negotiating meaning together. Basic interpersonal communicative skills (BICS) language skills needed to interact in social situations, primarily to context- bound, face-to-face communication. To understand the competence approach to language teaching first we have to review what a competence is and what kind of competences there are. Communicative competence falls in the category of a basic or key competence. Several approaches have been discussed to understand this competence both from the basic educational side and the language teaching one. So we can lists the competences of both approaches. And what we find is that the content of the language teaching side can also be found in the basic educational side. The sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic competences are the same in the educational approach. And the grammatical competence relates to the linguistic. This tells us that in order to teach a language we must first study who to teach in general. This will help us understand what a competence is and how they all interact in forming a competent student.

Other important definition is by Michael Canale and Merrill Swain who mention four different components, or subcategories, make up the construct of communicative competence, which are: Grammatical competence, Discourse competence, Sociolinguistic competence, and Strategic competence. Those are the four aspects that they mentioned. Grammatical competence is the ability to recognize and produce the distinctive grammatical structures of a language and to use them effectively in communication. Discourse competence is the ability we have to connect sentences in stretches of discourse and to form a meaningful whole out of a series of utterances. Sociolinguistic competence is the ability to interpret the social meaning of the choice of linguistic varieties and to use language with the appropriate social meaning for the communication situation. Strategic competence is the manner of manipulating language in order to meet communicative goals. It used to compensate communication disruption caused by lack of communicative competence and to strengthen communicative effects. Because sometimes the person does not have the ability to speak with fluency, and there are some strategic to help them to improve their competence in order to have a good communicative competence.

By: Johanna del Carmen Lara Ramirez