Grammatical competence refers to the knowledge we have of a language that accounts for
our ability to produce sentences in a language. It refers to knowledge of the
building blocks of sentences (e.g., parts of speech, tenses, phrases, clauses, sentence
patterns) and how sentences are formed. Grammatical competence is the
focus of many grammar practice books, which typically present a rule of grammar
on one page, and provide exercises to practice using the rule on the other
page. The unit of analysis and practice is typically the sentence. While grammatical
competence is an important dimension of language learning, it is clearly
not all that is involved in learning a language since one can master the rules of
sentence formation in a language and still not be very successful at being able to
use the language for meaningful communication. It is the latter capacity which
is understood by the term communicative competence.