From Communicative Competence to Communicative Language Teaching

This paper tried to demonstrate the developmental history of the concept ”communicative competence” from three representative models, i.e. Hymes, Canale and Swain, and Bachman in order to find out the interrelationship between communicative competence and actual communication. This discussion highlights three components-organizational competence, pragmatic competence and strategic competence in Bachman's. Only when we have knowledge of language and the capacity to execute the competence, could we apply the communicative pedagogical applications properly into the Communicate Language Teaching (CLT) to achieve these competences.