The term ‘communicative competence’ coined by Dell Hymes, (1967, 1972), a sociologist, is comprised of two words the combination of which means competence to communicate. He referred to communicative competence as the ability to convey and interpret messages and to negotiate meanings interpersonally within specific context. Savington (1983) noted that , “communicative competence is relative, not absolute, and depends on the co-operation of all the participants involved”. Communicative competence refers to both knowledge and skill in using this knowledge, when interacting in actual communication. Knowledge refers to here to what one knows(consciously and unconsciously) about the language and about other aspects of communicative language use; skills refers to how well one can perform this knowledge in actual communication. In this paper I first would like to discuss different models of communicative competence and its components and then present some activities and strategies to develop communicative language abilities in the classroom. Keywords: communicative competence, illocutionary forces, stylistic adaptability, fluency activities, phonological variants