This chapter further specifies and particularises the concept of competence orientation in teacher education that was first outlined and presented in Chapter 1. First and foremost, it argues that discourse competence in the English language is an overarching goal of all language teaching and learning in schools. Thus, student teachers must fully acquire discourse competence to facilitate the development of their learners’ discursive and linguistic competences. The chapter elaborates on the general concept of competence in more detail before explaining discourse competence as a meta-concept. It also provides examples of how competence orientation is concretised in can-do descriptors for student teachers and outlines a broad range of English language teaching competences that need to be developed. Finally, the chapter explains and illustrates how competence orientation in teacher education is translated into structured curricular programmes.

The natural sciences produce knowledge. Not necessarily because they do experiments, or because they use precise measurement devices, or because they investigate reality, but because they have developed highly conservative epistemic cultures whose members are overwhelmingly concerned with what the community thinks. My purpose in this chapter is to support this claim as one component of more general conception of disciplinary knowledge, a species of knowledge of which both the natural sciences and the humanities have historically been able stewards. If we use the natural sciences as a model for what real knowledge looks like, the question, “Do the humanities create knowledge?” turns not so much on the degree to which the humanities employ the Scientific Method, but on the degree to which they partake of the social processes by which disciplinary knowledge is achieved.