Linguistic competence is concerned with knowledge of the language itself, its form and meaning’ ( Hedge, 2000: 46) . More specifically, it involves spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, word formation, grammatical structure, sentence structure, and semantics. Hedge emphasizes that linguistic competence is an integral part of communicative competence and it is wrong to think that communicative language teaching does not aim for high standard of linguistic correctness.
The term communicative competence is often used in contrast to Chomsky’ s term linguistic competence, which is understood as the tacit knowledge of language structure and the ability to use this knowledge to understand and produce language. For Chomsky, competence simply means knowledge of the language system: grammatical knowledge in other words. However, the above discussion on communicative competence helps us to see that real language use involves far more than knowledge and ability for grammaticality. In Hymes’ ( 1979: 15) words, there are ‘ roles of use without which the rules of grammar would be useless, which simply means, besides grammatical rules, language use is governed by rules of use, which ensures that the desired or intended functions are performed, and the language used is appropriate to the context. In other words, communicative competence entails knowing not only the language code or the form of language, but also what to say to whom and how to say it appropriately in any given situation. Communicative competence includes knowledge of what to say, when, how, where, and to whom.