Need for language education

People need to learn a second language because of globalization; connections are

becoming inevitable among nations, states and organizations which creates a huge need
for knowing another language or more multilingualism. The uses of common languages
are in areas such as trade, tourism international relations between governments,
technology, media and science. Therefore, many countries such as Japan (Kubota, 1998)
and China (Kirkpatrick & Zhichang, 2002) create education policies to teach at least one
foreign language at primary and secondary school level. However, some countries such
as India, Singapore, Malaysia and Philippines use a second official language in their
governing system. According to GAO (2010) many Chinese people are giving enormous
importance to foreign language learning, especially learning English Language.

History of foreign language education

Ancient to medieval period

Although the need to learn foreign languages is almost as old as human history
itself, the origins of modern language education are in the study and teaching of Latin in
the 17th century. Latin had for many centuries been the dominant language of education,
commerce, religion, and government in much of the Western world, but it was displaced
by French, Italian, and English by the end of the 16th century. John Amos Comenius was
one of many people who tried to reverse this trend. He composed a complete course for
learning Latin, covering the entire school curriculum, culminating in his Opera Didactica
Omnia, 1657.

In this work, Comenius also outlined his theory of language acquisition. He is one
of the first theorists to write systematically about how languages are learned and about
pedagogical methodology for language acquisition. He held that language acquisition
must be allied with sensation and experience. Teaching must be oral. The schoolroom
should have models of things, and failing that, pictures of them. As a result, he also
published the world's first illustrated children's book, Orbis Sensualim Pictus. The study
of Latin diminished from the study of a living language to be used in the real world to a
subject in the school curriculum. Such decline brought about a new justification for its
study. It was then claimed that its study developed intellectual abilities, and the study of
Latin grammar became an end in and of itself.

"Grammar schools" from the 16th to 18th centuries focused on teaching the
grammatical aspects of Classical Latin. Advanced students continued grammar study
with the addition of rhetoric.[1]

18th century

The study of modern languages did not become part of the curriculum of
European schools until the 18th century. Based on the purely academic study of Latin,
students of modern languages did much of the same exercises, studying grammatical
rules and translating abstract sentences. Oral work was minimal, and students were
instead required to memorize grammatical rules and apply these to decode written texts in
the target language. This tradition-inspired method became known as the 'grammar-
translation method'.[1]

19th–20th century

Henry Sweet was a key figure in establishing the applied linguistics tradition in
language teaching

Innovation in foreign language teaching began in the 19th century and became
very rapid in the 20th century. It led to a number of different and sometimes conflicting
methods, each trying to be a major improvement over the previous or contemporary
methods. The earliest applied linguists included Jean Manesca, Heinrich Gottfried
Ollendorff (1803–1865), Henry Sweet (1845–1912), Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), and
Harold Palmer (1877–1949). They worked on setting language teaching principles and
approaches based on linguistic and psychological theories, but they left many of the
specific practical details for others to devise.

Those looking at the history of foreign-language education in the 20th century and
the methods of teaching (such as those related below) might be tempted to think that it is
a history of failure. Very few students in U.S. universities who have a foreign language as
a major manage to reach something called "minimum professional proficiency". Even the
"reading knowledge" required for a PhD degree is comparable only to what second-year
language students read and only very few researchers who are native English speakers
can read and assess information written in languages other than English. Even a number
of famous linguists are monolingual.

However, anecdotal evidence for successful second or foreign language learning

is easy to find, leading to a discrepancy between these cases and the failure of most
language programs, which helps make the research of second language acquisition
emotionally charged. Older methods and approaches such as the grammar translation
method or the direct method are dismissed and even ridiculed as newer methods and
approaches are invented and promoted as the only and complete solution to the problem
of the high failure rates of foreign language students.

Most books on language teaching list the various methods that have been used in
the past, often ending with the author's new method. These new methods are usually
presented as coming only from the author's mind, as the authors generally give no
credence to what was done before and do not explain how it relates to the new method.
For example, descriptive linguistsseem to claim unhesitatingly that there were no
scientifically-based language teaching methods before their work (which led to the audio-
lingual method developed for the U.S. Army in World War II). However, there is
significant evidence to the contrary. It is also often inferred or even stated that older
methods were completely ineffective or have died out completely when even the oldest
methods are still used (e.g. the Berlitz version of the direct method). One reason for this
situation is that proponents of new methods have been so sure that their ideas are so new
and so correct that they could not conceive that the older ones have enough validity to
cause controversy. This was in turn caused by emphasis on new scientific advances,
which has tended to blind researchers to precedents in older work.

There have been two major branches in the field of language learning; the
empirical and theoretical, and these have almost completely separate histories, with each
gaining ground over the other at one point in time or another. Examples of researchers on
the empiricist side are Jesperson, Palmer, and Leonard Bloomfield, who promote
mimicry and memorization with pattern drills. These methods follow from the basic
empiricist position that language acquisition basically results from habits formed by
conditioning and drilling. In its most extreme form, language learning is seen as basically
the same as any other learning in any other species, human language being essentially the
same as communication behaviors seen in other species.

On the theoretical side are, for example, Francois Gouin, M.D. Berlitz, and Elime
de Sauzé, whose rationalist theories of language acquisition dovetail with linguistic work
done by Noam Chomsky and others. These have led to a wider variety of teaching
methods ranging from the grammar-translation method to Gouin's "series method" to the
direct methods of Berlitz and de Sauzé. With these methods, students generate original
and meaningful sentences to gain a functional knowledge of the rules of grammar. This
follows from the rationalist position that man is born to think and that language use is a
uniquely human trait impossible in other species. Given that human languages share
many common traits, the idea is that humans share a universal grammar which is built
into our brain structure. This allows us to create sentences that we have never heard
before but that can still be immediately understood by anyone who understands the
specific language being spoken. The rivalry of the two camps is intense, with little
communication or cooperation between them.

Methods of teaching foreign languages

Language education may take place as a general school subject or in a specialized
language school. There are many methods of teaching languages. Some have fallen into
relative obscurity and others are widely used; still others have a small following, but offer
useful insights.

While sometimes confused, the terms "approach", "method" and "technique" are
hierarchical concepts. An approach is a set of correlative assumptions about the nature of
language and language learning, but does not involve procedure or provide any details
about how such assumptions should translate into the classroom setting. Such can be
related to second language acquisition theory.

There are three principal views at this level:

 1. The structural view treats language as a system of structurally related elements to
code meaning (e.g. grammar).
2. The functional view sees language as a vehicle to express or accomplish a certain
function, such as requesting something.
3. The interactive view sees language as a vehicle for the creation and maintenance
of social relations, focusing on patterns of moves, acts, negotiation and interaction
found in conversational exchanges. This view has been fairly dominant since the
1980s.

Examples of structural methods are grammar translation and the audio-lingual

method. Examples of functional methods include the oral approach / situational language
teaching. Examples of interactive methods include the direct method, the series method,
communicative language teaching, language immersion, the proprioceptive language
learning method, the Silent Way, Suggestopedia, the Natural Approach, Total Physical
Response, Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling and Dogme language
teaching.

A method is a plan for presenting the language material to be learned and should be
based upon a selected approach. In order for an approach to be translated into a method,
an instructional system must be designed considering the objectives of the
teaching/learning, how the content is to be selected and organized, the types of tasks to be
performed, the roles of students and the roles of teachers. A technique is a very specific,
concrete stratagem or trick designed to accomplish an immediate objective. Such are
derived from the controlling method, and less-directly, with the approach.

Learning strategies
Code switching

Code switching, that is, changing between languages at some point in a sentence
or utterance, is a commonly used communication strategy among language learners and
bilinguals. While traditional methods of formal instruction often discourage code
switching, students, especially those placed in a language immersion situation, often use
it. If viewed as a learning strategy, wherein the student uses the target language as much
as possible but reverts to their native language for any element of an utterance that they
are unable to produce in the target language (as, e.g., in Wolfgang Butzkamm's concept
of enlightened monolingualism), then it has the advantages that it encourages fluency
development and motivation and a sense of accomplishment by enabling the student to
discuss topics of interest to him or her early in the learning process—before requisite
vocabulary has been memorized. It is particularly effective for students whose native
language is English, due to the high probability of a simple English word or short phrase
being understood by the conversational partner.
Teaching strategies
Blended learning

Blended learning combines face-to-face teaching with distance education,

frequently electronic, either computer-based or web-based. It has been a major growth
point in the ELT (English Language Teaching) industry over the last ten years.

Some people, though, use the phrase 'Blended Learning' to refer to learning taking
place while the focus is on other activities. For example, playing a card game that
requires calling for cards may allow blended learning of numbers (1 to 10).

Skills teaching

When talking about language skills, the four basic ones are: listening, speaking, reading
and writing. However, other, more socially-based skills have been identified more
recently such as summarizing, describing, narrating etc. In addition, more general
learning skills such as study skills and knowing how one learns have been applied to
language classrooms.

In the 1970s and 1980s the four basic skills were generally taught in isolation in a very
rigid order, such as listening before speaking. However, since then, it has been
recognized that we generally use more than one skill at a time, leading to more integrated
exercises. Speaking is a skill that often is underrepresented in the traditional classroom.
This could be due to the fact that it is considered a less-academic skill than writing, is
transient and improvised (thus harder to assess and teach through rote imitation).

More recent textbooks stress the importance of students working with other students in
pairs and groups, sometimes the entire class. Pair and group work give opportunities for
more students to participate more actively. However, supervision of pairs and groups is
important to make sure everyone participates as equally as possible. Such activities also
provide opportunities for peer teaching, where weaker learners can find support from
stronger classmates.

Sandwich technique

In foreign language teaching, the sandwich technique is the oral insertion of an

idiomatic translation in the mother tongue between an unknown phrase in the learned
language and its repetition, in order to convey meaning as rapidly and completely as
possible. The mother tongue equivalent can be given almost as an aside, with a slight
break in the flow of speech to mark it as an intruder.

When modeling a dialogue sentence for students to repeat, the teacher not only gives an
oral mother tongue equivalent for unknown words or phrases, but repeats the foreign
language phrase before students imitate it: L2 => L1 => L2. For example, a German
teacher of English might engage in the following exchange with the students:

Teacher: "Let me try - lass mich mal versuchen - let me try."

Students: "Let me try."

Mother tongue mirroring

Mother tongue mirroring is the adaptation of the time-honoured technique of literal

translation or word-for word translation for pedagogical purposes. The aim is to make
foreign constructions salient and transparent to learners and, in many cases, spare them
the technical jargon of grammatical analysis. It differs from literal translation and
interlinear text as used in the past since it takes the progress learners have made into
account and only focuses upon a specific structure at a time. As a didactic device, it can
only be used to the extent that it remains intelligible to the learner, unless it is combined
with a normal idiomatic translation.

Back-chaining

Back-chaining is a technique used in teaching oral language skills, especially with

polysyllabic or difficult words. The teacher pronounces the last syllable, the student
repeats, and then the teacher continues, working backwards from the end of the word to
the beginning.

For example, to teach the name ‘Mussorgsky' a teacher will pronounce the last syllable:
-sky, and have the student repeat it. Then the teacher will repeat it with -sorg- attached
before: -sorg-sky, and all that remains is the first syllable: Mus-sorg-sky.

Language education by region

Main article: Language education by region

Practices in language education vary significantly by region. Firstly, the languages being
learned differ; in the United States, Spanish is the most popular language to be learned,
whereas the most popular language to be learned in Australia is Japanese. Also, teaching
methods tend to differ by region. Language immersion is popular in some European
countries, but is not used very much in the United States.

Strategies in Teaching :Literature Activities

1. Identifying reading strategies in think-aloud response to a text. Select a short text—a

poem or a section of a story or novel—and do a think-aloud activity with a partner,
sharing your thoughts with the partner, who simply provides encouraging prompts. Then,
reflect with your partner on the kinds of reading strategies that you employed in doing the
think aloud, as well as the prior knowledge or schema you drew on in reading the text.
Then, reverse roles and have your partner do a think-aloud and reflection on the strategies
employed. Then, based on the strategies you and your partner employed, devise some
activities for fostering students’ use of these strategies.

2. Identifying cues signaling the use of strategies. Read a poem, short essay, short story,
and a one-act play. Then, identify the strategies you are employing in reading these
different texts and how these strategies differ according to each of these different genres.
Then, for these different strategies, identify those cues in a text specific to a certain genre
that invite you to employ certain strategies, for example, the use of titles in a poem that
invite you to infer the theme of a poem. Describe how these cues are designed to achieve
audience identification with the position, cause, or idea being proposed. To what degree
does the writer succeed in gaining audience identification?

3. Developing frontloading activities for teaching strategies. Select a text that you might
teach in student teaching. As you are reading the text, identify the strategies you are
employing in comprehending the text unique to the genre of that text. . Then, develop
some frontloading activities for modeling or scaffolding the use of these strategies
consistent with your students’ ZPD. Describe how you will model or scaffold the use of
strategies, how you will then have students practice the use of these strategies, and how
you will know that they have successfully learned to employ these strategies.

4. Selecting tools for teaching strategies. Select a poem that you would teach in your
student teaching. Re-read the poem several times and reflect on those strategies you’re
using in responding to the poem. Focus particularly on parts of the poem that may be
particularly difficult for students. Then, for each strategy, identify some specific write,
talk, art-work, or drama tools that you could use to help students employ these different
strategies.

For example, you could have students free write responses to specific parts of the poem
to help them develop the meaning of figurative language. Or, to have them define
intertextual connections, you could have them free write about another text the poem
reminds them of and then create spider maps with key concepts from the poem and the
other text as central circles and lines out from the circles representing specific meanings
for these concepts. Then can then draw lines between the poem map and the other text
map for use in determine similarities between the poem and the other text. They could
then formulate their interpretation of the poem based on these connections.

Once you’ve selected some tasks based on different tools, determine an appropriate order
for the tasks, “first-things-first,” so that each task serves to prepare students for the next
task. For example, the freewriting served to prepare students for the mapping. Consider
also whether you’ll need to provide students with modeling for different tasks. Then,
create an assignment based on your sequence of tasks.

5. Selecting and performing favorite poems or song/rap lyrics. Bring in a favorite poem
or song/rap lyrics to share with the class. Discuss reasons why you like this poem or
song/rap in terms of specific aspects of the poem and the genre features unique to each
text.
Then, perform this poem or song/rap lyric using techniques of oral interpretation:
determine the meanings you want to convey, practice performing the text by emphasizing
certain words or using pauses, and then share your performance with the class. (For
examples of adolescents performing poem in poetry slam contests, see the video, Poetic
License).

6. Create poetry anthologies or Web sites. Create poetry anthologies or Web sites based
on similar topics, themes, issues, or genre features (image poems, etc.). You can find
poems on various online poetry sites (see links) or published anthologies. You could also
illustrate their anthologies with visual images or drawings associated with the topics,
themes, issues, or genre features.

7. Analyzing the culture functions of myths or legends. Find some myths or legends
specific to a certain culture or nationality, for example, Native American, Norse, African,
Roman, Greek, Chinese, Eskimo, Inca’s, Mayan, etc. Describe how these myths or
legends shared certain similar storylines, for example, creation myths explaining the
creation of the world. Then, describe how these same myths or legends differ according
to the how they functioned in these different cultures to explain certain phenomena
unique to these cultures, for example, how Native American creation myths focused on
ecological aspects of man/nature/animal relationships while Greek myths focus on male
power relationships.

8. Analyzing the storylines in fantasy, science fiction, or adventure literature or films.

Examine the use of certain storylines in contemporary fantasy, science fiction, or
adventure literature or films popular with adolescents: the Harry Potter series, Lord of the
Rings, Narnia, etc. Define how consistent narrative patterns in these storylines reflect
certain cultural attitudes or beliefs operating in a culture or society. For example, in
fantasy novels and films, the quest pattern (Frye, 1957) in which the hero engages on a
journey to destroy evil and discover some truth about the world reflects a belief in the
clear distinction between good versus evil and then need for people to engaged in a
search for truths about their own lives. Or, the threats or challenges in science fiction
novels or films reflect the fears or concerns facing certain generations—disease, fear of
adversaries, nuclear bombs, ecological disasters, etc.

9. Making intertextual connections. In devising mythology, fantasy, or science-fiction

units, you need to encourage students to learn to define their own connections between
texts in an inductive, “bottom-up” manner. For example, in reading a series of fantasy or
science-fiction stories based on the quest pattern, students could be asked to define the
similarities between these stories in terms of the quest pattern. This requires that you
initially work with them in a “top-down,” deductive manner, providing them with some
concepts or schema about the quest pattern. Develop a mythology, fantasy, or science
fiction unit in which you include both “top-down”/deductive and “bottom-up”/inductive
activities for defining relationships between texts.

10. Helping students suspend disbelief. Reading fantasy and science fiction requires
students to suspend their disbelief so that they can accept an alternative version of reality,
something that may be difficult for “reality-bound” adolescents. For use in teaching a
fantasy or science-fiction novel, devise some activities that would help students suspend
their disbelief.

11. Addressing issues in science fiction. Much of contemporary science fiction addresses
current social, political, technological or ecological problems. To help students
understand these problems, it would be useful to collaborate with a social studies or
science teacher about social studies or science issues portrayed in science fiction. In
preparing to teach a science fiction novel, discuss some possible instructional techniques,
topics, or themes with a social studies or science teacher. For example, visual
representations of the technology imagined in a science fiction novel can be compared to
present day technologies. Students can discuss what ideas, beliefs, or knowledge may
have inspired the differences or similarities between the technologies.

12. Studying initiations. Students could study of examples of initiations in contemporary

society, literature, and film. They could identify the larger purpose for the initiation as
well as norms constituting success in achieving the initiation. For example, leaving home
to travel or to attend college represents a form of initiation into new, different world (see
Emra, Coming of Age, 2001, for stories related to “leaving home.”)

13. Studying heroes and anti-heroes. Students could study the topic of heroes and anti-
heroes, examining characteristics of what contributes to being a hero in different
historical periods and cultures, as well as what prevents contemporary characters from
achieving heroic stature. They could also examine why the system often works against
the hero’s attempts to change the system.

14. Issues of subjectivity and objectivity in essays. Read some essays associated with
“New Journalism” by writers such as Thomas Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, or Joan Didion.
Describe the ways in which the writers’ subjective perspectives shape their analysis of
their subject or topic. Discuss the issue of objectivity in journalism—the extent to which
writers can achieve an “objective” perspective on their subject or topic.

15. Create essay anthologies. Create some essay anthologies using short essays about
similar topics, themes, issues, or phenomena. Compare and contrast the authors’
perspectives and attitudes related to the same topic, theme, issue, or phenomenon. Write
a preface for the anthology defining these differences and similarities in writers’
treatment of these topics, themes, issues, or phenomena.

16. Creating parodies of genre texts. Collect some examples of parodies or satires of
genre texts, for example, parodies of romantic poems, song lyrics, self-help essays, etc.
Then, discuss how the parody or satire is used to ridicule the use of genre conventions
through mimicry of language or exaggeration of genre features. For example, Mary
Shelley’s (1977) novel, Frankenstein, mimics the use of “science talk” set against talk of
political power, romance, and religion.