An Empirical Study of Communicative Competence in Tertiary Level Students of Public Sector institutions in Pakistan

The following study aims at evaluating the level of English language speaking fluency in tertiary level students of public sector universities in Southern Punjab region of Pakistan. The study has theoretical underpinnings in Hymes’ (1967) and Canale and Swain’s (1980) idea of communicative competence, which encompasses the linguistic as well as the social aspect of language competence. The data is collected from the learners and their teachers through questionnaire and interviews following mixed method approach allowing the corroboration of findings from one type of research through the other type. The population consisted of 100 tertiary level students majoring in English and their teachers. The findings of the data revealed that the learners lacked the ability to communicate effectively in the target language. Major barriers in successful language learning and communication were found to be poor educational and economic background, and lack of communicative language teaching (CLT) strategies in classroom. Future researchers can conduct studies on higher-level students to evaluate their communicative competence.