Discourse competence is the ability to produce and interpret connected, coherent stretches of language, whether spoken or written, that function as unified texts rather than collections of unrelated sentences.
Canale (1983) added discourse competence as the fourth component of communicative competence, separating it from sociolinguistic competence in the original Canale and Swain (1980) model. Celce-Murcia, Dörnyei, and Thurrell (1995) later placed it at the centre of their model, arguing that discourse competence is where all other competences converge in actual communication (see Communicative Competence Models).
| Component | What it involves |
|---|---|
| Cohesion | Explicit linguistic ties across sentences: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, lexical cohesion (Halliday & Hasan, 1976) |
| Coherence | Underlying logical and thematic connectedness: whether a text "makes sense" as a whole |
| Rhetorical organisation | How ideas are structured: problem-solution, cause-effect, comparison, chronological sequence |
| Genre conventions | Knowledge of text-type expectations: an academic essay, a business email, and a narrative each follow different structural norms |
| Information structure | Theme-rheme progression, given-new organisation, topic sentences, paragraph unity |
| Discourse Markers | Signals that organise text and guide interpretation (however, in addition, so, right) |
The demands differ substantially:
A learner may have strong written discourse competence but struggle to maintain coherence in unplanned speech, or vice versa.