ABSTRACT
The past dozen or so years have seen a major shift within the education system towards MFL courses with a vocational or applied bias (see Allford and Pachler, 1998:2-3). So great has been the change that today ‘a majority of university language students are specialists in disciplines other than languages’ (Coleman, 1996:70). Likewise, students in higher education who might once have specialised in MFLs alone now combine them with, for instance, business studies or computing, conscious that ‘employers do not tend to recruit people primarily for their linguistic ability’ (Rigby and Burgess, 1991:8) but expect prospective employees to offer other substantive skills and knowledge besides. The major changes sweeping through the labour market and MFL education have one priority in common: the acquisition of communicative competence in the target language (TL).
