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ategic competence consists of verbal and non-verbal strategies of communication that may be employed to compensate for communication breakdown attributable to “performance variables or to insufficient competence.” Communication strategies are of two kinds: those that are relevant, mainly to grammatical competence and those that relate more to socio - linguistic competence. An example of the first kind is to paraphrase grammatical forms that a person has not mastered or cannot recall, momentarily, while examples of the second would be the various role playing strategies such as how a stranger should be addressed by someone who is uncertain about the stranger’s social status. Other applied linguists, notably, Bachman ( 1990 ) and Blum-Kulka and Levenston ( 1983, p. 120 ), have offered aditional extensions to communicative competence. Blum-Kulka view semantic competence as consisting of: Awareness of hyponmy, antonymy, converseness, and other possible systematic links between lexical items, by means of which, the substitution of one lexical item for another can be explained in particular contexts. Ability to avoid using specific lexical items by means of circumlocution and paraphrase. Ability to recognise degrees of paraphrasic equivalence. Bachman has posited two core aspects of linguistic competence, organizational competence which subsumes grammatical and discourse competence, as well as, pragmatic competence which encompasses illocutionary and sociolinguistic competence. In describing what she regards as a conceptual expansion, Kasper ( 1997, p. 345 ) notes that strategic competence operates at the levels of pragmatic and organisational competence but in a broader sense than that proposed by Canale and Swain. While the ability to solve receptive and productive problems due to lack of knowledge or accessibility remains an aspect of strategic competence, it is now more generally thought of as the ability to use linguistic knowledge efficiently. She adds that the extension is compatible with the view that language use, a version of goal oriented behaviour, is always strategic. It is the American anthropologist, Dell Hymes, in the early seventies, who first put forth the idea of communicative competence. Schacter ( 1990, pp. 39 - 40 ) notes that the “model” of communicative competence proposed initially by him gave tremendous impetus to linguists frustrated by a principal focus on grammatical competence. Two of those linguists, Tarone and Yule ( 1989, p. 17 ) identify a major shift in perspective within the second language teaching profession. In relatively simple terms, there has been a change of emphasis from presenting language as a set of forms ( grammatical, phonological, lexical ) which have to be learned and practised, to presenting language as a functional system which is used to fulfil a range of communicative purposes. This shift in emphasis has largely taken place as a result of fairly convincing arguments, mainly from ethnographers and others who study language in its context of use, that the ability to use a language should be described as communicative competence. The principal ethnographer is, of course, Hymes ( 1971a, 1972, 1977, 1988 ) whom Ellis and Roberts ( 1987, pp. 18 - 19 ) claim was interested in: what degree of competence speaker/hearers needed in order to give themselves membership of particular speech communities. He examined what factors - particularly socio – cultural ones – in addition