12. Communicative Competence While communicative competence (CC) has come to convey a multiplicity of meanings depending on which teacher or researcher you consult, it is nevertheless a useful phrase to keep in your teacher's repertoire. In its skeletal form, CC consists of some combination of the following components. Organizational competence (grammatical and discourse)
Pragmatic competence (functional and sociolinguistic)
Strategic competence
Psychomotor skills
The array of studies on CC provides what is perhaps the most important linguistic principle of learning and teaching:
Given that communicative competence is the goal of a language classroom, then instruction needs to point toward all of its components: organizational, pragmatic, strategic, and psychomotor. Communicative goals are best achieved by giving due attention to language use and not just usage, to fluency and not just accuracy, to authentic language and contexts, and to students' eventual need to apply classroom learning to heretofore unrehearsed contexts
in the real world. Consider the following six classroom teaching "rules" that might emerge:
(1) Remember that grammatical explanations or drills or exercises are just one part of a lesson or curriculum; give grammar some attention, but don't neglect the other important components of CC (e.g., functional, sociolinguistic, psychomotor, and strategic).
(2) Some of the pragmatic (functional and sociolinguistic) aspects of language are very subtle and therefore very difficult. Make sure your lessons aim to teach such subtlety.
(3) In your enthusiasm for teaching functional and sociolinguistic aspects of language, don't forget that the psychomotor skills (pronunciation) are an important component of both. Intonation alone conveys a great deal of pragmatic information.
(4) Make sure that your students have opportunities to gain some fluency in English without having to be overly wary of little mistakes all the time. They can work on errors at some other time.
(5) Try to keep every technique that you do as authentic as possible: Use language that students will actually encounter in the real world and provide genuine techniques for the actual conveyance of information of interest, not just rote techniques.
(6) Some day your students will no longer be in your classroom. Make sure you are preparing them to be independent learners and manipulators of language "out there."