An outline is provided of the contents and boundaries of three areas of competence, or systems of knowledge, that are to be minimally included in a theory of communicative competence: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence. Grammatical competence is concerned with the rules of sentence grammar and sentence grammar semantics. Sociolinguistic competence includes sociocultural rules for determining the social meaning and appropriateness of a single sentence or utterance; it also includes discourse rules for determining the cohesion and coherence of groups of utterances. Strategic competence is composed of verbal and nonverbal communicative strategies that are used to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to performance factors or to insufficient grammatical or sociolinguistic competence. It is suggested that the value of such a theoretical framework for second language learning is that it provides a clear initial statement, or construct, of communicative competence. Such a statement is helpful not only for the purposes of second language teaching but also for those of second language testing. (Author/AMH)