Convivial communication: recontextualizing communicative competence

The advent of the concept of communicative competence in English Language Teaching (ELT) over thirty years ago signalled a shift from grammar‐based pedagogy to Communicative Language Teaching. It was generally accepted that, in addition to grammar rules, language teaching needed to take account of social context and social rules of use. The concept of communicative competence, initially developed for ethnographic research, appeared to offer an intellectual basis for pedagogic broadening. The transfer of this concept from research to language teaching has, however, produced abstracted contexts and idealized social rules of use based on (English language) native‐speakerness. Drawing on recent work in the fields of World Englishes, English as a lingua franca and Second Language Acquisition, this article argues that it is imperative for ELT to take notice of real‐world social, cultural and language developments in contemporary conditions and to re‐engage with a set of reformulated ethnographic sensitivities and sensibilities.