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Although there have been reformulations of the different components of knowledge that underlie Canale and Swain’s 

influential model of communicative competence, the model—in its slightly modified form by Canale (1983)—still forms the 

conventional framework for curriculum design and classroom practice associated with communicative language teaching in an 

educational context. The notion of communicative competence described in the model entails four competencies, which are 

commonly referred to as grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, and strategic 

competence. The first and foremost is grammatical or formal competence, which refers to the Chomskyan concept of linguistic 

competence; it is the native speaker’s knowledge of the syntactic, lexical, morphological, and phonological features of the 

language, as well as the capacity to manipulate these features to produce well-formed words and sentences. It provides the 

linguistic basis for the rules of usage which normally result in accuracy in performance. The second, sociolinguistic 

competence, deals with the social rules of language use, which involve an understanding of the social context in which 

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language is used. Such factors as the role of the participants in a given interaction, their social status, the information they 

share, and the function of the interaction are given importance. Social context here refers to the culture-specific context 

embedding the norms, values, beliefs, and behavior patterns of a culture. Appropriate use of the language requires attention to 

such constructs. Next comes discourse competence, which is the ability to deal with the extended use of language in context. 

This is ordinarily achieved through the connection of a series of sentences or utterances to form a meaningful whole. These 

connections are often quite implicit: ideas are linked to each other based on general knowledge of the world as well as 

familiarity with a particular context. Where these conceptual and experiential bonds are weak or inadequate, the meanings 

inferred from them are likely to be erroneous. Studies in contrastive rhetoric provide ample evidence for culture-specific 

thought patterns and organizational differences that lead to serious misunderstandings. In such cases, formal cohesive devices 

normally used to establish overall coherence among propositions fall short of achieving adequate interpretation. The last 

component in the model is strategic competence, which is defined as the ability to cope in an authentic communicative situation 

and to keep the communicative channel open. This requires the knowledge of communication strategies that one can use to 

compensate for imperfect knowledge of rules, or for factors such as fatigue, inattention, and distraction which limit the 

application of such rules.