Language education
[1][2] There are four main learning categories for language education: communicative competencies, proficiencies, cross-cultural experiences, and multiple literacies.
Common languages are used in areas such as trade, tourism, diplomacy, technology, media, translation, interpretation and science.
Many countries such as Korea (Kim Yeong-seo, 2009), Japan (Kubota, 1998) and China (Kirkpatrick & Zhichang, 2002) frame education policies to teach at least one foreign language at the primary and secondary school levels.
Ancient learners seem to have started by reading, memorizing and reciting little stories and dialogues that provided basic vocabulary and grammar in naturalistic contexts.
They covered topics such as getting dressed in the morning (and how to manage the slaves who helped with that task), going to school (and evading punishment for not having been there yesterday), visiting a sick friend (and how to find an individual unit in a Roman apartment block), trading insults (and how to concede a fight graciously), or getting a new job (a piece of cake if you have studied with me, an ancient teacher assured his students mendaciously).
[5] For many centuries, Latin had been the dominant language of education, commerce, religion, and government in much of the Western world.
He composed a complete course for learning Latin, covering the entire school curriculum, culminating in his Opera Didactica Omnia, 1657.
Oral work was minimal, and students were instead required to memorize grammatical rules and apply these to decode written texts in the target language.
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 practical details for others to develop.
This was in turn caused by emphasis on new scientific advances, which has tended to blind researchers to precedents in older work.
[8] Examples of scholars on the empiricist side include Jesperson, Palmer, and Leonard Bloomfield, who promoted mimicry and memorization with pattern drills.
These methods follow from the basic empiricist position that language acquisition results from habits formed by conditioning and repetition.
De Sauzé, whose rationalist theories of language acquisition dovetail with linguistic work done by Noam Chomsky and others.
Using these methods, students generate original and meaningful sentences to gain a functional knowledge of the rules of grammar.
These methods follow from the rationalist position that man is born to think, that language use is a uniquely human characteristic, and that it reflects an innately specified universal grammar.
The simplest books are phrasebooks to give useful short phrases for travelers, cooks, receptionists,[15] or others who need specific vocabulary.
Software can interact with learners in ways that books and audio cannot: Websites provide various services geared toward language education.
Some sites are designed specifically for learning languages: Many other websites are helpful for learning languages, even though they are designed, maintained, and marketed for other purposes: Some Internet content is free, often from government and nonprofit sites such as BBC Online, Book2, Foreign Service Institute, with no or minimal ads.
Focused listening is very important when learning a foreign language as the slightest accent on a word can change the meaning completely.
There are other strategies that also can be used such as guessing, based on looking for contextual clues, spaced repetition with a use of various apps, games and tools (e.g. Duolingo and Anki).
[32] Blended learning combines face-to-face teaching with distance education, frequently electronic, either computer-based or web-based.
Such activities also provide opportunities for peer teaching, where weaker learners can find support from stronger classmates.
The aim is to make foreign constructions salient and transparent to learners while avoiding the technical jargon of grammatical analysis.
It differs from literal translation and interlinear text since it takes the progress that learners have made into account and only focuses on a specific structure at a time.
Therefore, as a teaching strategy, code switching is used to help students better gain conceptual competences and to provide rich semantic context for them to understand some specific vocabularies.
[39] By two years, children produce sentences that are grammatically similar to those of adults, including in the types of errors that they make.
One would be able to undergo a lot of specialized learning in order to truly master a great number of rules of vocabulary, grammar and verbal communication.
Compared to other life stages, this period is the hardest to learn a new language due to gradual brain deterioration and memory loss.
Such a holiday often combines formal lessons, cultural excursions, leisure activities, and a homestay, perhaps with time to travel in the country afterwards.
