Communicative Competence: A pedagogically motivated model with content specifications analysis

            The development of English language has been successfully improved by educational models which were applied, not only in a native language speaker environment, in an ESL as well in many countries. In the area of language acquisition, communicative competency and communicative language teaching are key concepts. Parks (1985) emphasizes three interdependent themes:  control, responsibility, and foresight; and argues that to be competent, we must "not only 'know' and 'know how,' we must also 'do' and 'know that we did'" (p. 174).   He defines communicative competence as "the degree to which individuals perceive they have satisfied their goals in a given social situation without jeopardizing their ability or opportunity to pursue their other subjectively more important goals" (p. 175).  Instructors as well as the students may want to keep in mind the goals of communicative competence, learners should be able to make themselves understood, try to avoid confusion in the message (due to faulty pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary); to avoid offending communication partners, and to use strategies for recognizing and managing communication breakdowns and develop a cognitive understanding of the language used in the communication process.

            Rubin (1985) explains that communication competence is “an impression formed about the appropriateness of another's communicative behavior” and that “one goal of the communication scholar is to understand how impressions about communication competence are formed, and to determine how knowledge, skill and motivation lead to perceptions of competence within various contexts” (p. 173).