What do students and engineers have to say about communicative competence in technical oral presentations?

This article reports how the notion of communicative competence was perceived by engineering students and engineers during 16 final year technical oral presentation sessions. Six sub-sets associated to linguistic and rhetorical competence such as brevity and terminology; confident, interactive and argumentative language; visual language; humour; formality, and exchange of questions are deemed necessary. There is, however, notable diversity in the participants' perception of the said notion. Engineers stressed contextualised real-world application presentation, while students were drawn toward academically inclined structured content based type of presentation. Implications of the study for English Language teaching in the ESL context are discussed. © Universiti Putra Malaysia Press.