Communicative competence

The communicative competence is the general category that is conformed of four different competences that help the speaker to communicate. Those competences are: The linguistic competence, the sociolinguistic competence, the discourse competence and the strategic competence.

To complement this, the linguistic competence is the creative capacity of using the language, the sociolinguistic competence is the  knowledge of social "rules": how to  use and respond in different types of communicative relations. The discourse competence is basically the capacity of create conversations or writings and actually understanding them. And finally, the strategic competence is to know how to prevent, fix or even identify communicative downsides on a communicative excessive.

Usually, the term communicative competence is more widely used in educational contexts than in linguistics; on education, it is part of the communicative approach that can be used while teaching a foreign language.

In this way, it is necessary to always take into account those four aspects while teaching, so the learning experience can be as enriching as possible and, at the same time, make students actually able to communicate on the target language and not only just to provide information about the language.

If you are interested, you can check more information about the competences in here.