Introduction. The article notes that a very wide range of opinions is presented in the works of Russian scientists regarding the assessment of the formation of students' speech skills and abilities, which is due to the difference in personal experience and research goals. The author believes that an objective tool for assessing the degree of formation of communicative competence could be a competence-based approach, however, provided that the content of all levels of this competence is precisely formulated. Methods. In the course of the research, a set of complementary general scientific (synthesis, abstraction, classification, etc.), pedagogical (comparative analysis of pedagogical concepts, generalization of pedagogical experience; evaluation of the effectiveness of applied teaching methods, etc.) and philological (discourse analysis, rhetorical analysis, etc.) methods were used. Results. The structure of the communicative competence of the native language should be formulated separately from the structure of the foreign language communicative competence, since the tasks and initial experience of students in these situations will be different. The communicative competence of the native language has two levels: linguistic and discursive. The language level is under the jurisdiction of traditional linguistics and describes those resources (both linguistic and speech) that are available to a person preparing to communicate. It includes proper language and speech competencies. The discursive level is under the jurisdiction of communicative linguistics and describes the knowledge and skills that are necessary for the effective construction of one's utterance in direct communication. It includes discursive and rhetorical competencies. The language level is background and has no direct relation to the professional competence of a specialist, which is fully formed only at the discursive level.