18 focused on the acquisition of linguistic knowledge into language as
communication. The term communicative competence itself was firstly coined by Hymes Cheng and Kong, 2009: 33; Richards and Rodgers, 2006: 159. This term
was coined by him in order to contrast a communicative view of language and Chomsky‘s theory on language competence. As mentioned before, communicative
competence shifted the view of language as structural system influenced by Chomsky into communicative functions.
a. The Definition of Communicative Competence
The term communicative competence is commonly used by many people in different ways. Some of them use it as the contrast to the grammar teaching
approach and audiolingualism method. Some of them also use it as the synonym of progressive and innovative teaching Savignon, 1997:7. Basically, term
communicative competence consists of two words ‗communicative’ as the
modifier and ‗competence’ as the head of the phrase. Literally, ‗communicative’ means willing to talk to people and give them information, and competence
means the ability to do something well Cambridge Advanced Learner‘s Dictionary. Thus, it can be inferred that communicative competence means the
ability to talk and give information. However, such kind of simple lexico semantical analysis is not adequate to perceive what is really meant with
communicative competence. A technical definition is needed in order to grasp the idea of such term and also can be relevant for this scientific research.
Canale and Swain as cited in Savignon 1997 define communicative competence as a synthesis of an underlying system of knowledge and skill needed
19 by speakers and hearers when dealing with communication. In their concept of
communicative competence, knowledge refers to the conscious or unconscious knowledge of an individual about language and about other aspects of language
use. To add, they also believe that there are three types of knowledge: knowledge of underlying grammatical principles, knowledge of how to use language in a
social context in order to fulfill communicative functions and knowledge of how to combine utterances and communicative functions with respect to discourse
principles. To add, communicative competence is not only as an inherent grammatical competence but also as the ability to use grammatical competence in
a variety of c ommunicative situations Hymes as cited in Bagarić and Djigunović,
2007. Accordingly, Savile-Troike 2006: 100 also defines communicative
competence as ―everything that a speaker needs to know in order to communicate appropriately within a particular com
munity.‖ This definition, besides supporting Canale and Swain definition on communicative competence, adds the idea
‗communicate appropriately within a particular community‘ as the underlying idea. This imposes that the main point is the ability to use language as the native
speakers‘ use.
b. Models of Communicative Competence
