Strategic Competence: The Concept and its Role in Language Assessment

Strategic competence is one type of communicative competence among others which have been postulated by Canale and Swain in 1980 as ‘verbal and non-verbal communication strategies that may be called into action to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to performance variables or to insufficient competence’. It refers to the ability to get one’s meaning across successfully to communicative partners, especially when problems arise in the communication process, and the ability to convey information to a listener and correctly interpret information received. It has great implications in language teaching by determining the main ability of learners’ communicative competence.