J. TECHNICAL WRITING AND COMMUNICATION, Vol.

7 ( 2 ) , 1977

ENGLISH FOR COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE:

HELPING SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS
FROM OVERSEAS

R I C H A R D COLLET
Department of English
University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology

ABSTRACT
Traditional courses and course-books for teaching English as a foreign
language are often too general and grammar-orientated for students of
technology from overseas. The students are well motivated for learning
how t o communicate effectively within their technical contexts. To
harness their enthusiasm, courses on communication skills need to
emphasize functions as well as forms o f language.

Each year, the University of Wales Institute of Science and

Technology receives a number of overseas postgraduate students.
They form a distinctive part of the University population, and
their presence is welcome. Often, however, their command of
English, in academic and social situations, prevents them achieving
their potential as specialists and as human beings, and from playing
a full part in university life.
Some of them try t o remedy their shortcomings by attending
evening classes, where they may be in groups with their wives,
immigrant workers, and au pair girls. When, inevitably, such general
English classes fail to provide them with solutions to their particu-
lar problems, and when the academic pressures build up as term
goes on, the overseas students tend to withdraw to the physical
isolation of the library, with a growing sense of frustration. This
frustration is matched by the dissatisfaction among teachers in
main-subject departments, who are not generally expected t o have

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160 / RICHARDCOLLET

the time or the skill t o correct any but the grossest errors in the
students language.
This problem has led us to devise an intensive presessional
course for postgraduate overseas students, which will harness the
expertise of two sections of the English Department-the Commun-
ication Studies Unit, with its experience in running programs on
effective scientific and technical communication, and the Linguistic
staff, who have extensive experience in teaching English as a
foreign language.
Our course has the aim of providing each student with the means
of bringing his communicative ability in academic and social tasks
up to his own level of self-fulfillment; in other words, a competent
chemist should not be frustrated or downgraded because he cannot
put his thoughts into decent English: equally, a slow plodder should
not be dressed up linguistically as a sparkling Einstein (though there
are, in sociolinguistic fieldwork, cases of people who really develop
their whole personalities only through a second language; and
equally, in our experience, people who were wrongly put down as
no good at languages at an early stage, due to inadequacies of
the material or the teacher: if we catch some of these in our net it
will be an added bonus).
What the student wants from us is guidance and practice in the
behaviour of academic and practical tasks-following lectures,
participating in seminars, carrying out laboratory work, writing
reports. He may not know that this is what he wants, and there
are many willing teachers t o reinforce his ignorance, for example,
by giving him a grammar course, plus a frequency count of lexical
items from the specialist subject, as if the naming process was what
the language is all about. We cannot, of course, ignore the learners
expectations-especially when he is both volunteer and customer.
So what do we know about him and his background?

Student Background
We can predict that our students will possess:
a. first degrees in their specialist subjects (i.e., academic/technical
but nonlinguistic training) ;
b. varying levels of ability and fluency in English, because of
1. different mother tongue backgrounds;
2. different lengths and methods of English study;
3. different amounts of exposure t o the language; the main
variables are:
 ENGLISH FOR COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE / 161

i. an environment where English is the second language,

for example, the new Commonwealth;
ii. an environment where English is a foreign language, for
example, the Middle East, South America;
iii. the length of any previous study in the United
Kingdom;
c. an awareness of their individual language limitations, and
strong motivation t o improve.
Broadly speaking, they will possess a scientific frame of mind,
and welcome any assistance that linguistics-the scientific study of
language-will be able t o provide.
In these circumstances, a structure-based course, using a con-
ventional teaching textbook would not be efficient because
a. if it were descriptive and overt, it could easily become a
linguistics course (leading to motivation turn-off);
b. if it were covert, through pronunciation drills, pattern
practice, and structural manipulations, it would take far too
much time, and be boring and repetitive for students already
competent;
C. if the students were underachieving, any remedial
component using classroom methods they had already
experienced would be unlikely to succeed; rather it would
cement mental blockages;
d. grammatical competence does not automatically lead t o
communicative competence.
This last point needs some comment, as it is fundamental to the
planning and teaching of our course.
Grammatical competence means, briefly, a familiarity with the
formal features of the language: in English, for example, common
word order of declarative, interrogative, and imperative sentences,
the construction of the continuous, past, perfect, and passive verb
structures, and so on. Most English teaching materials till recently
have been geared to developing this grammatical competence and,
in terms of the desired terminal behaviour of the learner, have
often been found wanting: in Wilga Rivers words, teachers
concentrate on the route and lose sight of the ultimate goal.
Communicative competence on the other hand, has been
defined as the ability to converse or correspond with another
person in a real-life, real-time situation: the use of English, rather
than a knowledge of the usage. This emphasizes the goal-orientated,
functional view of the language, both at the basic common-core
162 / RICHARDCOLLET

level, which forms the first half of our course, and in our later,
more detailed analysis of scientific and technical writing. T o take
an obvious example, the student must be aware that what is
formally a declarative sentence need not automatically function as
a statement; with a rising intonation, it becomes a question;
similarly, an interrogative form Is that door open? under certain,
specifiable, conditions, functions as an order for the addressee to
perform an action, rather than produce a verbal response.
Of course we cannot properly involve the student in a discussion
of the uses of a grammatical form if he is incapable of correctly
and spontaneously constructing it: the ideal communicative
competence must have a firm foundation of grammatical
competence.
The linguistic facts are clear: the problems are psychological,
pedagogic, and methodological. It might be useful t o draw up a
crude catechism of the controversy between Grammatical
Competence (G.C.) and Communicative Competence (C.C.)
Q. Can we teach G.C.?
A. Yes, we are good at this (we teach it t o computers!)
Q. Is G.C. a desirable end?
A. No, it is the means t o an end.
Q. Is C.C. a desirable end?
A. Clearly, yes.
Q. Is teaching C.C. practicable? Have we adequate descriptions
on which to base our teaching?
A. Not so emphatically, but still, yes.
Q. Does G.C. lead t o C.C.?
A. Only in exceptional circumstances, and with plenty of time.
Look at the dropout rate in language learning.
Q. But do we need G.C.?
A. Yes, of course. We cannot discuss the uses of the passive in
scientific writing with people who cannot recognize the form
when they see one, or construct it when they need to.
Q. Can a G.C. course then gradually merge into a C.C. course?
A. Its unlikely. G.C., almost by definition, is a bits-and-pieces
approach, quantitative; C.C. is looking from the whole t o the
parts, qualitative.
Q. So there is going to be a cutoff point of G.C.?
A. Yes. Once weve established a manipulative level of structure-
processing ability we can move to a cognitive level of
co ncept-processing ability.
Q- Where is that cutoff point; where do you draw the line of
G. C.?
 ENGLISH FOR COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE / 163

A. Well, we must look at the foundation component, the first

half of the course.

The Foundation Component

We cannot build our castle of cognitive and communicative
processes on the shifting sands of grammatical insecurity; so we
need a strong foundation. How long this takes to establish is
impossible to specify; ideally, if the students are a fairly homo-
geneous group, clustering somewhere around the level of the
Cambridge First Certificate, between a third and a half of the
total course should suffice.
This foundation includes a minimum common-core of communi-
cative ability, without which the rest of the course would be
meaningless: greetings, understanding instructions, asking for
information, etc.-emphasis, as David Wilkins points out [ 11, as
much on doing things with the language as on describing things by
means of language. Any obvious structural deficiencies in the
language are revealed here, and in the initial diagnostic tests, with
students thence directed to individual unit-packs for self-paced
remedial work, ending with an attainment test.
It is necessary t o have materials available for (at least) two levels
of student: those who will be spending a large proportion of their
time on intensive remedial packages, and those already at the
foundation level who would, in my experience, appreciate a fairly
rigorous description of the sound system of English, intonation
patterns, and modern linguistic insights, particularly into the
implicit semantic values of structural forms.
During this first part of the course, both levels, call them
remedial and advanced, have to follow the core of work o n social
and general academic orientation, and refreshment of listening,
speaking, reading, and writing skills within a functional framework.
We still have to decide where the cutoff point is to be set, a
threshold of intelligibility in pronunciation, basic syntactic manipu-
lations, and a fundamental lexical store. I suggest that a checklist
of grammatical competence is t o be found, very broadly and with
some exceptions, in the elementary and intermediate exercises in
Stannard Allens Lioing English Structure [ 21 . The best description
of how these grammatical categories are t o be realized in communi-
cative functions is David Wilkins 1973 Council of Europe Paper,
1973 [l]. And Leech and Svartviks recent A Communicatiue
Grammar of English [4] provides a reference textbook which
draws attention t o the semantic function of grammatical forms,
164 / RICHARDCOLLET

and is a useful and interesting approach for students at revision or

remedial levels.
Our aim is through practical activities to teach, or to revive, the
learners motor manipulative skill (as how to construct the past
tense), and then t o put that skill into legitimate meaningful context
(when to use the past tense). Advanced work in these skills is
covered most efficiently within the specific purposes context of
the students real-life reading and writing in science and technology.
A typical mornings work in the foundation section of the course
might be:
STUDENT ACTIVITY
X t a b d
Y t a c d
Z t a d e

First, all students take t, a diagnostic or progress test. While this

is being marked, all attend an introductory lecture, say on students
union activities and facilities, discounts, travel concessions,
insurance, and so on: each lecture must have specific followup
work, either individual, in pairs or in groups, including particularly
role-playing activities to develop communicative skills. This is part
a.
The test reveals that student X is unsure of the syntax or
componence of the past tense, so he is directed t o part b, a
remedial package centered on the language laboratory, consisting of
spoken and written practice drills. If there are a number of students
with the same problem, a tutor will be ready to put them through
the lesson together.
Meanwhile, student Y has been seen to be having trouble with
his writing; it is slow and untidy and blocking his progress psycho-
logically and physically. He is therefore directed to enter at a
certain stage of the writing package c, which leads from capital
and small case letters (form-filling) to cursive writing, to short
personal letters, a handout on spelling rules (slow-taped dictations),
hyphenated word segmentation (dictionary work), a handout of
punctuation rules (sentence embedding and conjunction, and graded
paragraph writing). (The brackets represent practical activities.)
Again, if enough students have a problem on the same level, a small
tutorial group will be formed for that one lesson.
Meanwhile, student Z passes the test successfully and needs none
of this remedial work. He can either follow up the communicative
 ENGLISH FOR COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE / 165

activities outlined in a, or take an appropriate unit from the

reading or listening packs-comprehension passages to brush up his
receptive skills: these have been chosen with the general student of
science and technology in mind, and omit the narrative/descriptive
literary texts which are the stock-in-trade of most all-purpose
(=purposeless?) English courses. This is part e above.
Finally, all students come together again for a talk on how to
use the dictionary [ 5 ] , part d. This excellent book is another
reason why a set textbook is superfluous: there are enough
activities t o be developed from this book for a week of homework
or individual study lessons.

BUILDING O N THE FOUNDATION: THE SECOND HALF

If we accept that our foundation has been laid through a balance

of general lectures (mainly social and academic orientation) and
remedial grammar packages (in groups, pairs, and individually), a
similar sort of academic framework can be erected for the second
part of the course-the component focusing on English for science
and technology. Again we have general lectures and workshops, on
the principles of scientific and technological communication, with
small tutorial groups for the special disciplines of the students.
As previously implied, we need here t o move away from the
bits-and-pieces approach which characterizes most general English
courses, as being psychologically and methodologically invalid-no
matter how situationalized they may claim to be. Because most
language courses offer a progressively more complex process of
manipulation of segments, one is led t o hope that success is
quantitative: you practice making phonemes and graphemes, arrange
them into words, juggle them around into sentences, and so on up
the scale until you arrive at the finished text, e.g., a scientific
paper. In reality, of course, the process is just the reverse: you
make meaning, in Hallidays phrase, feel the need t o communi-
cate something, decide on factors like who the addressee is and
your relations with him and the medium of communication, decide
on what forms would be appropriate, check that they are gram-
matical, and monitor your output through the surface features of
the spoken or written word. Most courses concentrate on the last
two features (excusably, since phonetics and syntax occupy most
research time and it is in this microlinguistic area that our
knowledge is greatest); but even a 100 per cent efficient process of
teaching and learning this grammar would be only a small (but
basic?) part of the overall task of acquiring communicative fluency
166 / RICHARDCOLLET

in the language. Once our students have reached the foundation

level, there is no point in continuing t o drill them in the tenses of
English (for example) or t o require them t o insert articles in
uncontextualized sentences.
So the preparation of the second part of the course, which leads
directly into the academic year, involves establishing the functions
and structures of general scientific and technical English as revealed
in lectures, seminars, and written work, as well as the particular
subject-specific features. With these targets identified, we need t o
explore a variety of means for student practice, e.g., taking a text
to pieces, starting from a conceptual, informational viewpoint and
narrowing down t o the grammatical exponents, seeing how the
ideas are distributed within and among the paragraphs, how the
paragraph holds together through sequencing and cohesive features,
and how the sentences and clauses follow descriptive rules, e.g., of
conjunction and embedding, the logic of the article and pronoun
systems, how punctuation-or in the spoken mode, intonation-
helps the receiver t o get the message.
After an examination of the general principles of scientific and
technical writing, the second part of the course continues by
focusing on the subject specialism of the learners; and while we
recognize that our presessional course is f a r from being unique in
British universities, we do feel that one feature is worth
emphasizing: the close links we have with the departments to
which the students will shortly be going. This enables us to make a
close analysis of the linguistic activities each student will be
required to perform during his specialist studies, and t o decide how
much attention t o pay t o their practice. The language skills
required in the lecture theatre are different from those of the
laboratory, a face-to-face tutorial makes differing demands from
those of a large group seminar. The mix of activities varies con-
siderably from department t o department. Videotapes of short
lectures by members of the departments can be analyzed, to
familiarize students with their pronunciation and teaching styles;
typical extracts from the first recommended textbooks and hand-
outs can be duplicated and subjected t o close scrutiny.
In all this, the English staff make no claim to being polymaths-
t o knowing all the jargon and technical terminology of subjects as
diverse as electronics, port administration, town planning, and
maritime law. The vocabulary of these subjects is to some extent
becoming international, and a learner with a relevant first degree in
the subject in his own language should already have the conceptual
 ENGLISH FOR COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE / 167

background and thus the potential t o acquire the new lexical items
necessary.
But the subject will be taught and learned through a code, and
the code is English. We have t o make sure that it is functioning
properly, that the messages get through efficiently. Thanks to the
work of Selinker and Trimble [6], and of Halliday [ 7 ] , and
others, we are getting t o grips with the code: given a piece of
technical writing we can decide whether it is intelligible, and which
factors make it so, and whether it may be structured more
concisely without loss of this intelligibility, although we may not
be able t o interpret some of the lexical items. To take a blatant
example, we can tell that Jabberwocky is certainly a piece of
English, as opposed t o French or Russian, despite a lack of
dictionary definitions of the lexical words.
Throughout the latter part of the course, our students focus on
examples of scientific and technical writing from their subject
specialism: they examine bad writing, and try to find out why it
does not succeed; they examine good writing, and try to classify
those features which are worthy of emulation. They analyze the
rhetorical and cohesive features which make up a text, rather than
a mere string of sentences. Because ultimate success in the
University depends on either a written examination or a disserta-
tion, they are happy to concentrate on the techniques and
principles of technical English.
General English courses have often in the past failed to meet the
demands of these students. We attempt t o offer more scope through
techniques such as individualization and language games, and
through planned progression from social and academic orientation
to the specialist level of technical discourse and communication.

REFERENCES
1. D. A. Wilkins, An Investigation Into the Linguistic and Situational Content
of the Common Core in a Unit/Credit System, in Systems Development in
Adult Language Learning, Council for Cultural Co-operation, Council of
Europe, Strasbourg, 1973.
2. W. S. Allen, Living English Structure, Longman, 1959.
3. D. A. Wilkins, op. cit.
4. G . N. Leech and J. Svartik, A Communicative Grammar of English,
Longman, 1975.
168 / R I C H AR D COL L E T

5. A. S. Hornby, Advanced Learners Dictionary of Current English, Oxford

University Press.
6. L. Selinker and L. Trimble, Formal Written Communication and ESL,
Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 4:2, 1974.
7. M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan, Cohesion in English, Longman, 1973.

Direct reprint requests to:

Richard Collet
Department of English
University of Wales Institute of Science and Technology
57 Park Place
Cardiff, Wales CF1 3AT