| As the goal for English teaching is concerned with enabling learners to interact successfully with members of other societies, the exploration of applied linguistics into the theories of communicative competence assumes increasing relevance and usefulness. This paper is divided into five chapters.The first chapter introduces the reasons that account for choosing this topic. At present, both the college English teachers and the students spend much time and effort practicing the language competence. However, they tend to ignore the other components of communicative competence. Therefore, the students' spoken English will not be communicatively successful. A communicatively competent English speaker is what our country needs badly so it is our primary task to improve the college students' communicative competence in English. The second chapter gives an overview of the theories of communicative competence. In this chapter, the theories proposed by different linguists are introduced. In Chomsky's view, competence refers to one's underlying knowledge of a system, event, or fact. The term 'communicative competence' was coined by Dell Hymes (1967, 1972). It consists of four aspects: possibility, feasibility, appropriateness and effectiveness. Canale & Swain's communicative competence consists of grammatical competence, discourse competence, socoilinguistic competence and strategic competence. Based on the earlier theories, Bachman proposes his communicative competence, which includes language competence, strategic competence, and psychophysilogical mechanisms, which in turn consists of some sub –skills. Language competence is composed of organizational competence (including grammatical and textual competence), and pragmatic competence. Grammatical competence includes those competencies involved in language usage, such as the knowledge of vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and phonology/ graphology. Textual competence includes the knowledge of the conventions for joining utterances together to form a text, such as reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction, and lexical cohesion. Pragmatic competence includes the types of knowledge which, in addition to organizational competence, are employed in the contextualized performance and interpretation of socially appropriate illocutionary acts in discourse. Strategic competence consists of assessment, planning, and execution components. Strategic competence refers to, in communication, how to assess each other's language and background knowledge and then make a plan as to how to realize the communicative purpose, which will be realized by psychophysiological mechanisms. Psychophysiological mechanisms include the neurological and physiological processes involved in language use. Wen Qiufang proposes the cross-cultural competence in her cross-cultural communicative competence. The cross-cultural competence consists of three components: sensitivity of cultural difference, tolerance of cultural difference, and flexibility of dealing with cultural difference. If the students have acquired this competence, they will learn to understand the cultural difference, hold a correct attitude about cultural difference, and be able to deal with the cultural conflicts appropriately. In the third chapter, by collecting the data from the tape-script of 30 test takers of CET Spoken English Test and that of the class activities of 30 students, the author presents the analysis of the data with reference to the theoretical basis of this paper. Firstly, the students still have difficulty in language competence, although great emphasis has been put on it. Mistakes can still be found in grammar, morphology, phonology and syntax. The students show textual competence only in organizing the discourse in a simple way. The components of pragmatic competence are only applied in the subjects they are familiar with in the daily life. The students can get used to both British English and American English. The ability to interpret cultural differences and figures of speech is lim...
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