V. Cook asks “What does another language do?” And the answer is: “Learning another language
makes people think more flexibly, increases language awareness and leads to better understanding of other
cultures.” (Cook 2001: 197). But this is one side of the matter. The other is that the person becomes
competent in his professional field. Communicative competence is the term which “has come to be used in
language teaching contexts to refer to the ability to convey the meaning to successfully combine a
knowledge of linguistic and sociolinguistic rules in communicative interactions” (Savington 1983: 123). H.
Pham thinks that in order “to attain effective communication in international settings, nonnative speakers
must use linguistic and cultural norms which are mostly set by native speakers of English” (Pham 2001: 7).