Competence for Foreign Language Learning and Teaching. Introduction

Abstract

Competence is one of the fashionable terms which permeate public and academic discourses of the 21st century. Accompanied by a plethora of meanings, competence has, rather expectedly, become an inflated notion (Weinert & Helmke, 1998; Virkus, 2009). While we intuitively know what competence, competency or a competent person mean, precise definitions are hard to obtain. To paraphrase Felstead et al. (2002), considering the enormous interest in competence – its structure, development and distribution – there is surprisingly little consensus on what competence actually refers to. This status quo is not helped by context-dependence of competence, i.e. its conceptual reliance on a particular domain within which the term is applied.