Saeid Najafi Sarem is a Ph.D student at Islamic Azad University, Science and Research branch, Tehran, Iran.

INTRODUCTION

There have been reformulations of the different components of knowledge that underlie Canale and Swain’s influential model of communicative competent, 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 many educational contexts.

The notion of communicative competence described in the model entails for competencies, which are commonly refer to as grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, and strategic competence. The first and for most 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. (more…)