You say communicative competence and I say social literacy.  Interaction to blogs, groups, social media, presentations, mock meetings and interviews, social gatherings, dinners, club functions, informal conversation are all mediums for social literacy an can be assessed by a simple rubric while being monitored.

Check my book on communicative competence; the whole of chapter two is on this.

Thank you very much for your help.

 If you mean communicative competence in the field of linguistics (as understood by Hymes and Habermas etc.), then I'd suggest looking for scales measuring linguistic competence (especially in pedagogic studies you will find measures). 

If you mean communicative competence, however, as Jim Patterson sees it, then I'd say take a closer look at what you wish to measure exactly because social literacy is very broad and almost impossible to capture as one construct.

You might be interested in The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.

Great answer Sander.  According to the science of socio-psycholinguistics, which is much more interesting than the name implies, linguistics are used by generations of people who have never mastered it; they simply reach a level of competence they are comfortable with and stop growing.  So to define social communicative competence you would have to take into consideration the level of competence that the test subject feels comfortable with?  The whole concept is fraught with qualifying conditions that exist in a specific society.  Tough research!

 Thank you very much Harkaitz. The book is so information-rich and of great help.

You are wellcome

Communicative competence includes several subcompetences, whose name and number may vary according to the different authors, such as linguistic (or grammatical) competence, strategic competence, sociolinguistic competence, pragmatic competence and sociocultural competence.

So, in my opinion, if you want to make sure you are assessing your students' communicative competence, you will have to take all those subcompetences into account, not just the grammatical one.

 Thank you Alicia. I agree.

I always follow the advise of my late father who was a great teacher of French by the way. He told me once that the moment you are able to read and understand poetry in another language is the very indicator of achieving a near-native communicative competence in that target language. So, from time to time I will give my students  some poems to read and enjoy-enjoyment is also a competence.Needless to say that poetry summarizes all human meanings and feelings and thus I think It would a good scale with which you could measure your students' competence.

This is interesting. Thank you very much Brahim.

Dear Cameen,

For operationalizing a theoretical construct  like communicative competence,  one has to find a model or some down to earth framework that specifically defines and determines the components comprising it. There exists several models of communicative competence. However, the one introduced by Bachman (1990) takes a multiaspectual stance including a number of competences. The idea is that the rules of usage must serve the rules of use in which when? to say what? to whom? and how? become significant factors in successful communication. Naturally, as Brahim says, poetry and literature are essentially important media providing indirect evidence reflecting a person's realization of what communicative competence is all about.

Best regards,

R. Biria

 Dear Biria,

Thank you very much for your advice. I checked out Bachman already; it's of very much help. Thank you again.

Cameen

I worked on measuring communicative competence some two years ago. During the research I discovered that one of the most difficult things to do in SLA research is measuring CC. The reason is that many factors play into the competence of the speakers. Check Stephen Krashen's model. It does appear to be very helpful. Check also my work on CC.

i think it is hard to measure the communicative competence since it consists of different competencies such as grammatical competence, writing competence, lexical competence etc. Therefore, you should cover all these competencies to get the accurate measure.

For scales see the CEFR scales and descriptors for foreign language competencies.

http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/cadre1_en.asp

They have specific suggestions for communicative competencies. 

Yes, I agree so much with Amy Zlotnick....CEFR can serve beneficially for you...