A Study of Communicative Competence

This paper presents in brief the process of defining communicative competence.The idea of the term communicative competence and its different components has been a matter of great interest in SLA.To communicate in a reallife contest one should possess the ability to use not only grammatically correct language, but also language that is socially appropriate.A number of theoretical models have been presented to specify its different components.But none of the existing theoretical frameworks is however wholly satisfactory and there seems to be room for further amendment and elaboration.After a brief review of some wellknown models an important and novel feature of this new model is presented with psycholinguistic competence which corresponds with strategic competence in the existing models, but is subdivided into a number of other new competences.Several important definitions and models of communicative competence are presented in this paper.