Communicative competence is an essential language skill, the ability to adjust language use according to specific contexts and to employ knowledge and strategies for successful communication.

Matthew Kanwit is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. His research on communicative competence and functional approaches to L2 acquisition has appeared in Applied Linguistics, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Language Learning, The Modern Language Journal, and the Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Sociolinguistics.

Megan Solon is Lecturer in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University, USA. She researches the acquisition of phonetics/phonology, including sociolinguistically variable features. She is co-editor of the Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics book series and co-author of The Acquisition of Spanish as a Second Language: Foundations and New Developments.

Table of Contents

List of contributors

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction: Historical overview, key constructs, and recent developments in the study of communicative competence

Matthew Kanwit and Megan Solon

Part 1: Theoretical overviews of communicative competence

2. Generative considerations of communicative competence

Alan Juffs

3. Sociolinguistic approaches to communicative competence

Kimberly L. Geeslin and Stacey Hanson

4. Sociocultural considerations of communicative competence

Matthew E. Poehner

Part II: Methodological tools for researching communicative competence

5. Investigating communicative competence in ethnographic research

Rebecca Lurie Starr

6. Real-time psycholinguistic measures of communicative competence

Jill Jegerski and Sara Fernández Cuenca

7. Corpus-linguistic and computational methods for analyzing communicative competence: contributions from usage-based approaches

Stefan Th. Gries

Part III: Applications: How do learners show communicative competence?

8. Interlanguage pragmatics as communicative competence

Minh Thi Thuy Nguyen

9. Applying a communicative competence framework to the study and teaching of second language writing

Charlene Polio and D. Philip Montgomery

10. Computer-assisted language learning and communicative competence

Glenn Stockwell and Yurika Ito

11. Assessing communicative competence

Luke Harding, Susy Macqueen, and John Pill

12. Looking forward: Future directions in the study of communicative competence

Megan Solon and Matthew Kanwit

Index