TESOL QUARTERLY, Vol. 26, No. 1, Spring 1992

Variation and Universality in Communicative Competence: Coseriu's Model

PHILIP SHAW

University of Newcas{le upon Tyne

Both nonnative and native speakers of a language vary in their knowledge and control of the elements of communicative compe­tence. Some of these elements themselves are universal and avail­able to all speakers of all languages, while others are universal in the sense that they can be used in any language the speaker knows, but are not equally available to all speakers. Other elements are language-specific and have to be learnt anew whenever a new language is acquired, while others again are culture-specific and the property of groups within or across language communities. The article introduces an interpretation of Coseriu' s neo-Saus­surean model of communicative competence which takes account of these factors and illuminates the teacher's everyday task.

The notion of communicative competence underlies much recent thinking about language teaching. Put crudely, the idea is that proficiency in a language means not only knowing its phonology, syntax, vocabulary, and semantics but also being able to make use of this knowledge appropriately in actual communication (Canale, 1983; Canale & Swain, 1980; Hymes, 1972). Making use requires both other kinds of knowledge (rules about when to say what to whom) and what may be called control (Bialystok & Sharwood Smith, 1985) or ability for use (cf. Widdowson, 1989) .

The knowledge in question can be tacit or implicit; knowing a grammatical rule in this context does not mean being able to cite it but "having it" so that one can recognise if it is being broken, could potentially use it, etc. Control would cover things like the ability to get a sentence in the foreign language out under time pressure and in a real situation. One might need not only to know how to behave at a cocktail party but also to be able to behave in that way.

Language teachers regularly use the concept of communicative competence and find it valuable. In testing, for example, they use it

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to assess whether learners are acquiring what they should (Carroll, 1980) and in course design to ensure that proprosed learning programmes cover the whole range of language needs (Dubin & Olshtain, 1987). In order to do so they have to break down communicative competence not only into knowledge and control, but also into aspects such as Canale's (1983) grammatical, sociocultural, discourse, and strategic competence and then provide opportunities for learning all four in the course.

No one is wholly satisfied with the current model of communica­tive competence. One problem is with the term competence. Chomsky's competence is only knowledge (Taylor, 1988) , so something which includes both knowledge and control is not strictly competence. We may, however, continue for convenience to use the familiar term, as other writers do (Davies, 1989; Hornberger, 1989; Widdowson, 1989; etc.) .

Another problem is that Canale's four aspects mentioned above are indeed aspects rather than components, both because they are unclearly defined in the model and because empirical analysis of learner performance cannot (yet) demonstrate that they exist independently (Bachman & Palmer, 1982; Schachter, 1990a) . Again, we may continue to use the four-aspect classification as an aid to understanding if we remember that the distinctions are rather arbitrary.

The problem I want to address here is that of universality and culture-boundedness and its relation to variation in communicative competence among native speakers. How does the model of communicative competence deal with nonnative speakers who can do some things better than native speakers? How does it cope with goo'd communicators who communicate well in all the languages they use? How does it describe the difference between the Spanish scientists described by St. John (1987) , who could already write academic articles and only needed English words and syntactic structures, and novice writers who need not only language but also composing skills and genre knowledge? Why do some students in international classes need help with a whole range of skills and strategies, while others seem to want or need only to learn "the language"? Can these students be right in saying, We don't need skills, we need grammar? Does the ESOL teacher need to teach a given student to structure a talk or essay (as an Ll teacher would need to) , or is it the anglophone/Western structural conventions that need to be taught, or is it simply the English words for structuring (Cumming, 1989; Swan, 1985)?

Helpful as the current model of communicative competence is, it is not designed to illuminate such questions as these. The purpose of

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this paper is to suggest an alternative conceptualisation which throws emphasis in different places and provides a terminology and a framework which help to differentiate between individuals, relate Ll and foreign/ second language teaching, and clarify the various ways in which communicative competence transcends language barriers. The paper examines some kinds of differences in initial communicative competence one might find among the members of a class and then draws attention to an analysis of communicative competence (Coseriu, 1980), not hitherto widely used in English­language applied studies, which is particularly helpful in allowing us to answer questions like those posed above.

VARIATION IN COMMUNICATIVE COMPEJ'ENCE

It is natural for foreign/ second language teachers to assume that natives have perfect knowledge and control of their language, but if their own experience, and the existence of Ll teachers, did not convince them that this was not the case, empirical studies would. Bachman (1990), for example, comments on the results of research into the Canadian English-in-French immersion programme that the

varied profiles of performance of native speakers on different components of language proficiency, as well as the wide variations in differences between the performance of native and non-native speakers, are ... remarkable. (p. 27)

Children and adults have genuine gaps in their Ll expertise and need instruction (even in unexpected areas like listening, cf. Ander­son & Lynch, 1988). We can therefore ask what sorts of competence we can expect native speakers to be uniformly perfect in and where we expect variation, and then ask what further variation we can expect from nonnative speakers.

Take, first of all, the grammatical aspect. The knowledge half of this contains phonology, syntax, lexis, and semantics-Chomskyan competence. Native speakers might reasonably be expected to have complete knowledge of the phonology and syntax of their dialect/ accent, but there will be many words (with their meanings) which are part of the language but unknown to a particular individual. Native speakers have, that is, complete knowledge of morphosyn­tax but varying degrees of knowledge of lexis and semantics. Nonnative speakers clearly have varying degrees and qualities of knowledge of all aspects of the language. None will have "better" phonology or syntax than a native speaker but many may have a wider or at least different vocabulary.

COSERIU'S MODEL 11

Though all normal native speakers must have good control or ability-for-use of the grammatical aspect, they vary in their control of some sentence production skills. Bloomfield's (1927) Menomini speakers, the unskilled White Thunder and the skilled Red Cloud Woman, are standard examples of individuals with different degrees of syntactic control. Consequently, some nonnative speakers might have more control in a given area of grammatical ability-for-use than some natives. Of course, such judgements are dangerous because no one knows what the criterion is (see Canale & Swain, 1980, and Hornberger, 1989, on ability-for-use).

Sociolinguistic competence includes appropriateness of meaning and appropriateness of form. Here, too, expert speakers may vary both in knowledge of the rules and in control of them. Lack of knowledge appears in native speakers who cannot say the right thing in an unfamiliar context, such as in a court of law or addressing traditional notables, because they do not know the relevant rules. For nonnative speakers every situation is potentially unfamiliar, because of having sociolinguistiC conventions that are unknown. Lack of control is exemplified by people who always say the wrong thing because they lack sensitivity or skill in assessing ap­propriacy; in this respect there are many nonnative speakers who can acquit themselves better in most situations than native speakers. One might want to say that native speakers are uniformly perfect in their knowledge of the rules of their subcultures (knowing what the significance of particular replies to compliments is, for example (Holmes & Brown, 1987; Wolfson, 1983), but in doing so one ignores the reality that human beings are generally half in one subculture and half out of another.

Discourse competence in Canale's (1983) model includes coherence, perhaps mediated by genres and other schemas, and cohesion as a linguistic correlate. Here too there is variation among expert speakers due to ignorance of patterns of organisation and due to lack of control of them. Thus we will meet both native and nonnative speakers who cannot produce an effective written account because they are ignorant of what they are supposed to do and others who lack the control to tell a joke effectively despite having heard many jokes (Davies, 1989). The more effective nonnative speakers could well do better than the less effective natives; Harley, Allen, Cummins, & Swain (1990b) report that the nonnative speakers in their study actually exceeded the natives in a number of areas connected with the organisation of written discourse.

Strategic competence is composed in Canale's model of repair strategies for dealing with unsuccessful communication and

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enhancement strategies for making communication more effective. Here too individual speakers of a language, native and nonnative alike, vary in their control over both types of enhancement strategies, and probably also in their knowledge of them.

Thus native speakers vary in their knowledge and control of some parts of all four aspects of communicative competence and, except in knowledge of phonology and syntax (admittedly the crucial elements!) , it is possible for nonnative speakers to be superior to natives.

UNIVERSALI1Y

Within the established model it is accepted that both native and nonnative speakers of a language vary in their degree of knowledge and control. Here I wish to introduce another axis of variation, which is concerned with the extent to which a particular piece of knowledge or ability is universal, language-specific, or culture­specific.

Universals are familiar from second language acquisition research (Cook, 1988; Ellis, 1986), which suggests that there are universal principles of grammar (or phonology) which are innate and hence available at some time (see Schachter, 1990b, and Zobl, 1990, for examples) to every speaker. Somewhat similar "universal" principles exist in other aspects of communicative competence. Blum-Kulka (1989) refers to a universal expectation that there will exist both conventionalised (Could you possibly clean it?) and nonconventionalised (lf s dirty) indirect ways of making a request. Grice's (1975) conversational maxims (be truthful, say no more or less than necessary, be relevant, be brief and clear) could be further examples. ·

But we have seen above that not all elements of communicative competence are equally available to all (native) speakers of a language, and this is true on the level of these "universals" as well. There are elements of communicative competence which are aspects of general cognitive ability, innate or acquired, and hence available for use in any language known to the speaker, but none­theless unequally distributed among individuals. Writing is an example. Cumming (1989) has shown that writing expertise and sec­ond language proficiency have independent effects on the quality of the second language written product and that writing expertise, though varying among individuals according to aptitude, training, or experience, is independent of the language used. Cases of major writers like Ngugi wa Thiongo who write in several cultures and languages (English, Swahili, Gikuyu), emphasise the point.

COSERIU'S MODEL 13

The remaining elements of communicative competence operate at either the specific-language level or the cultural/textual level. The distinction between these levels has arisen in the discussion of Canale' s model of communicative competence, which has touched on the way some elements within the four aspects, such as knowledge of text types, seem to depend on cultural criteria, while others, such as cohesion, seem to be more linguistic in nature (Schachter, 1990a).

Members of different (sub )cultural groups using the same language (scientists and pop singers, Jamaicans and Scots) may have very different repertoires of text types, although, by virtue of the fact that they speak the same language, one would expect them to have rather similar systems of cohesion. On the other hand, scientists who speak different languages might have very similar text-type repertoires, despite the differing cohesive systems. This was evidently true of St. John's Spanish scientists (1987) cited above. This illustrates the distinction between the specific-language level-what is true of English speakers or French speakers-and the textual or cultural level-what is true of everyone in a particular community. The community in question could be a subset of a language community like "British people" or a multilingual one like "civil engineers." The introduction of a cultural level, which would naturally involve elements of all aspects of communicative competence, would allow the model to accommodate Schachter' s (1990a) question, "Is it not the case that cultural or sociological criteria influence all levels of a grammar, phonological to syntactic, to pragmatic?" (p. 44)

Thus some elements of communicative competence are universal, in that whoever has them (or has acquired them) can apply them in any language, some are applicable only to a specific language, and some are available only to members of a certain community or cultural group.

The point can be further illustrated by reference to sociolinguistic competence. Some of the relevant rules are universal, some language-specific, and some culture-specific. The distinction between the specific-language and the cultural level in sociolinguis­tic competence corresponds to one made by Thomas (1983). She has two distinct types of sociolinguistic failure: pragmalinguistic failure, where communication fails because the sociolinguistic function of a language item from Ll is wrongly transferred to its L2 translation equivalent, as when native speakers of German respond to thank you with please (translating bitte) instead of, for example, you' re welcome; and sociopragmatic failure, where a situation is

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"wrongly" evaluated, as when L2 speakers appear "too polite" because the situation demands greater politeness in their own culture than the one in which they find themselves. In pragmalin­guistic failure the problem is on the linguistic level, in socioprag­matic failure it is on the cultural. Blum-Kulka (1989) cites a couple whose norms for the appropriate use of polite requests in Hebrew vary because the wife was brought up in France, the husband in Israel. The husband perceives the wife as inappropriately polite and indirect. Both are equally competent in the language, and equally able to formulate polite requests and recognise them as such (pragmalinguistic competence), but there is a difference in their sociopragmatic competence because they have different cultural backgrounds.

In the less well-defined area of discourse competence, similarly, there are universal elements, such as the ability to use schemata to make sense of elliptical discourse:

I. a: That's the telephone. b: I'm in the bath. a: O.K. (Widdowson, 1978, p. 29)

2. a: Antelope. b: I haven't got my spear.

There are others, such as the uses of discourse particles ( doch, schon, zwar), in German and other languages, which are language­specific but generally available to all (native) speakers. Then there are those, such as knowledge of the conventions of the doctoral dissertation or of the novel, which seem to be properties of a aulture or subculture rather than a language. Schachter (1990a) observes that Canale's discourse component can be interpreted as either "textual knowledge" or "a limited concept of pragmatic knowl­edge" (p. 46). Textual knowledge is culture-based while pragmatic knowledge is language-specific.

These three levels-universal, specific-language, and cultural­and the range of variation that exists within communicative competence, are easily accommodated in the model which this article attempts to introduce.

COSERIUS MODEL

Language

Coseriu (1980) presents a model of language and competence which does not distinguish between Canale' s aspects, but enables the distinctions suggested above to be made simply and clearly.

COSERIU'S MODEL 15

According to Coseriu, language is a social construct {rather than something in an individual's head) in which everything exists on one or more of three autonomous levels: universal, specific-language, and textual.

At the top there is the universal level, where the units are semantic elements {notions?) like agent (derived by Coseriu from Fillmore, 1968) or more than one, which all languages must be able to represent somehow, whether by inflexions, word order, or lexical items. Everything that is true of language in general exists at this level.

Then there is the level of the individual language where the elements are formal ones like nominative or plural which somewhat indirectly represent the semantic elements (like agent) . At this level everything is defined which is a historically determined arbitrary feature of the language system: its phonology, its grammar, its particular packaging of semantic elements into the "signified" side of lexical items, its particular ways of indicating status by pronouns or attitude by intonation, and so forth.

Third, there is the level of the text (including spoken interactions and all real speech events) where the relevant units are speech acts (functions?) such as request or greeting, or genres like the sonnet or the journal article. At this level, the relevant knowledge states that a given form "counts as" a request, or that particular forms and contents are appropriate in phatic communion, or that in a telegram certain grammatical and appropriacy rules are relaxed.

Communicative Competence

From his model of language regularities, Coseriu develops a threefold division of sprachliches Wissen (linguistic knowledge) or Sprechenkonnen (ability to speak), terms which cover both knowl­edge and ability-for-use and should be translated as "communica­tive competence." {The modes of meaning at the three levels are respectively Bezeichnung, Bedeutung, and Sinn, which one might daringly translate in this context as "denotation," "sense/significa­tion," and "reference/value," following Lyons, 1977, and Widdow­son, 1978.) Figure 1 outlines the model and the rest of this section in­terprets it from the point of view of language teaching. The inter­pretation represents my own development and application of Co­seriu' s ideas.

Coseriu makes no mention of Chomskyan universal grammar principles and so his universal competence (untranslatably called elokutionell) covers central· cognitive processes; whatever is universal in semantic, discourse, sociocultural, and strategic

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Level

Typical

element

Success

criterion

Mark of proficiency

FIGURE I

Coseriu's Three Levels of Communicative Competence

Individual Universal language Textual

agent, subject, greeting, more than one plural love letter

congruent accurate, appropriate exemplary

clarity, cogency grammaticality conformity

knowledge and control. He maintains that this competence determines our ability to speak coherently, cogently, logically, and so forth-in other words, our effectiveness as speakers or writers in general. Our aim at this level is to be congruent, for example to be clear and coherent, to conform to the facts, or at least to maxims of relevance, to use schemata for coherence, to structure the telling of a joke, to use strategies to enhance communication effectively. The universality of this competence implies, as research like that of Cumming (1989) has found, that someone who is a good writer, speaker, reader, or listener in one language is likely to have the basis for a good performance in another, given the knowledge of code and text necessary for its instantiation.

There are ways of improving general abilities, such as sensitivity to the reader's expectations or use of advantageous strategies, which are related to universal competence and hence not to any specific language or any particular type of text. In English language writing this results in "reader-based prose" (Flower, 1979), but in other cultures such prose might appear insulting spoon-feeding; what is universal is the awareness of expectations, not the particular type of prose that results. A good deal of Ll teaching is directed at the development of universal competence, whether one sees it as "cop­ing with school nonsense" (Edelsky et al., 1983, p. 2) or as training to become a fully literate person. The foreign/second language teacher may have to do some training in this area, but in most cases will be more successful when enabling transfer than when trying to develop the skill from scratch (Cummins, 1983); exceptions are language learning strategies, which often have to be taught.

The second level covers competence in the system and the various conventionalised norms of the language in question (called

COSERIU'S MODEL 17

idiomatisch by Coseriu) : grammatical competence and whatever else (like the semantics, if not the usage, of French vous and tu) is characteristic of all speakers of the language. The criterion for success at this level is at least to be accurate, that is, to conform to the system and norms used by all native speakers (of the target dialect) . Thomas's (1983) pragmalinguistic failure is an example of lack of success at this level, since it deals with the pragmatic or sociocultural implications of items in one language as against another. Similarly, as noted above, the discourse roles of tenses or particles in a given language represent discourse competence at the specific-language level. Another criterion for success at this level is to be exemp/,ary, that is to conform to the prescriptive rules which native speakers may not follow (distinguishing disinterested and uninterested or due to and owing to).

The main thrust of the foreign/second language teacher's work at this level, of course, is ensuring that the learners have both adequate knowledge of the target language systems and adequate control over them for effective use. The Ll teacher has less to do at the lowest level here, but it is still necessary to teach the grammar of the written language, to develop vocabulary, and perhaps to teach whatever prescriptive rules are thought worthwhile. Swain (1985) and Harley et al. (1990b) found that native French speakers actually did worse on French punctuation than immersion-programme anglophones.

Competence at the level of text (expressiv for Coseriu) implies being able to produce spoken or written texts (in a wide sense, including dialogues, etc.) of the expected form. The aim here is appropriacy. It involves discourse and sociopragmatic knowledge and control in knowing when a certain type of written or spoken text (anything from an academic article to a joke) is called for and how it is structured. It also involves grammatical knowledge of the style or register normally used in the genre and thus interacts with individual-language competence.

These things are part of culture rather than the linguistic system. Blum-Kulka's (1989) Israeli/French example cited above shows that sociopragmatic failure can occur where both participants are fluent in the language. Similarly text types like prayers, research reports, medical prescriptions, sonnets, and telegrams (Coseriu's examples) are based in cultural institutions (religion, science, medicine, Western literature, technological society at a certain stage) which transcend language barriers, despite local "textual dialects."

At the textual level the tasks of Ll teachers and foreign/second language teachers are quite similar, since both have the duty of

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initiating learners into new text forms, building on forms that they already know. The foreign/second language teacher says, "A personal letter in English is quite like one in French but. . . . " The LI teacher says, "A business letter in English is quite like a personal letter but . . . . "

EXEMPLIFICATION OF THE MODEL

Listening

Consideration of listening skills in the light of Coseriu's three levels leads to a clearer understanding of the function of the "task" exercises now generally used, and of the reasons for different speeds of progress in learning through such tasks.

Being a good listener in any language involves knowledge of content schemata and sensitivity to similarities and differences between the speaker's views and one's own. It also requires the abilities, for example, to concentrate and to produce an appropriate balance between attention to the words of the text and evocation of previous knowledge. These are aspects of Coseriu's universal competence which are starting to be part of both LI and second language teaching (Anderson & Lynch, 1988) .

Good listening also involves, on the language-specific level, knowledge of the linguistic meaning of segmental and supraseg­mental phonological features, syntax, vocabulary, and of their sociolinguistic and discoursal functions, and the ability to recognise and interpret them. One cannot understand speech in a particular language unless one knows some of it, however much help one gets from universally applicable strategies of comprehension. Corre­spondingly, one may know from textual competence that the lecture genre makes important use of logical markers like firstly or therefore, but one must have language-specific knowledge of the corresponding forms and functions.

Listening also requires knowledge and control on the textual/ cultural level. Textual competence makes comprehension possible both by enabling listeners to interpret interchanges because it informs them of the value of utterances in given contexts, and by providing formal schemata (Carrell, I983) which allow prediction and gap-filling. Native and nonnative speakers alike need to learn what to expect in listening to new genres like lectures or religious rituals. For example, in a new culture one has to learn the patterns of repetition and ordering of broadcast news: the use of headlines and final summaries, the criteria for placing good and bad news, the

COSERIU'S MODEL 19

role of news about routine activities of the head of state, and so forth.

Some learners may develop the listening skill in a new language quickly because their progressively improving knowledge of the code enables them to make increasing use not only of extralinguistic knowledge but also of preexisting strategies (universal competence) and familiarity with the genre or speech situation (textual competence) . Other learners with equivalent improvement in knowledge of the code do not manifest so much progress in listening because they are having to acquire universal and/ or textual skills at the same time.

This analysis suggests two reasons for using communicative listening tasks: They off er learners who tend towards the first type the chance to automatise old skills in the new language but teach the second type of learners, perhaps more slowly, new skills as well as a new code. Coseriu's model thus justifies. the use of "genuine" communicative language-learning tasks in two distinct ways and perhaps leads task designers to think in a more differentiated way about the aim of each exercise, relative to the student group in question.

Writing

Application of this model to the teaching of writing provides useful insights into the aims and interrelations of the various approaches popular today.

The process approach (Spack, 1984; Zamel, 1983) emphasises writing expertise (Cumming, 1989) : the development and organisa­tion of ideas, planning, encouraging recursiveness, breaking up the task into manageable units, and so forth. In Coseriu's terms, it aims at competence on the universal level. There might be learners for whom this kind of training is necessary because the competence was never developed in the first language. In this case it is arguably most effective if done in the language with which learners are most familiar, so that difficulties are not compounded by simultaneous individual-language learning. For other learners, existing universal competence may simply be obscured because the difficulties involved in managing a new language code cause a Vygotskyan regression to a more primitive level of intellectual functioning (Frawley & Lantolf, 1985) . One might conclude that teaching in such a case should concentrate on general language proficiency, but it is equally likely that conscious attention to the composing process might facilitate unconscious acquisition of the necessary gram­matical competence.

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A "traditional" structure-based approach emphasises second language proficiency-Coseriu's individual-language competence, that is, the problems of encoding the ideas accurately in a new language. It is essential for all learners to acquire this competence, and the only question is how this acquisition is to take place and to what extent the writing class is the appropriate place.

A genre-based approach (Horowitz, 1986; Kaplan, 1983; Martin, 1988; Swales, 1990), finally, emphasises the format and content expected in particular genres, which enable writers to make use of or confront the expectations of the target culture (business, scientific, or target language) . This is Coseriu's textual competence. New genres must be learnt because they are parts of (sub)cultures which the learners wish or need to join.

In this framework, the observation ''The students can't even write this in the LI" is interesting. Does it mean that they lack the universal competence to organise their ideas in a reduced-context environment (Cummins, 1983) or to adapt to new schemata? Or does it mean that their textual competence is inadequate and they have never encountered this genre before? In the first case, the teacher is involved in a complex and slow process of education. In the second, the task is learning yet another text form. Although this is an activity which learners have been involved in all their lives, it is not a particularly easy task, since it involves learning the intellectual schema and rationale which lie behind the text.

Coseriu's model thus allows these three approaches to writing (process, structure-based, and genre-based) to be seen as address­ing different levels of communicative competence and hence as appropriate in varying proportions for different types of learners; the approaches become complementary rather than in conflict. This is a reflection of the general ability of the model to relate the claims of various schools of thought by putting transfer and universality at the centre of discussion of communicative competence, as they already are in discussions of more narrowly linguistic acquisition processes.

CONCLUSION

Coseriu's model has some theoretical advantages: It allows cultural features of discourse competence to be disentangled from sociolinguistic competence, showing that Is it culture-based? is a question of a different type from Is it part of sociolinguistic competence? One asks about the level on which the element exists, the other about the aspect to which it should be assigned. It also

COSERIU'S MODEL 21

provides a basis for reformulating Canale' s four aspects to avoid some of the lack of clarity mentioned by Schachter (1990a), such as the coexistence within discourse competence of language-based pragmatic knowledge and culture-based textual knowledge. But its main advantage is in offering teachers a different formulation of their task. Coseriu has demonstrated that communicative compe­tence has many layers and our previous discussion has shown that there are degrees of competence in most areas. These two insights allow us to systematise and understand many different kinds of deficit. Some learners could have good universal communication abilities and a good grasp of the language but lack the specific knowledge or control of the text types and norms which character­ise the community (e.g., of a particular country, of science, of inter­national business) , while others might already be well integrated into target community norms in their Ll but be less effective com­municators with less knowledge of the target language.

This could be an argument for tightly focussed courses aiming at particular needs and deficits. These are more of ten than not impractical, however, and the message is perhaps rather that one should devise tasks which enable everyone to get something from them: alongside practice in general (universal) communication skills there should be deliberate explicit or implicit input of syntax (for nonnatives) and vocabulary (for everyone) and cultural/textual information.

More importantly, Coseriu's model is an argument for careful and respectful analysis of individuals' needs and lacks; methods and evaluation should not, for example, favour the natural communica­tor with poor specific-language competence over the accurate but tongue-tied speaker. All levels and types of competence contribute to the final effect; courses and evaluation measures should cater to all of them . •

THE AUTHOR

Philip Shaw teaches English for academic purposes and applied linguistics in the Language Centre at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in Britain. He has taught in Thailand and Germany and has published on English and German word formation and on academic writing, which is currently his main interest.

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