Language education

Language education refers to the process and practice of acquiring a second or foreign language. It is primarily a branch of applied linguistics, however can be considered an interdisciplinary field. There are four main learning categories for language education: communicative competencies, proficiencies, cross-cultural experiences, and multiple literacies. Language education refers to the process and practice of acquiring a second or foreign language. It is primarily a branch of applied linguistics, however can be considered an interdisciplinary field. There are four main learning categories for language education: communicative competencies, proficiencies, cross-cultural experiences, and multiple literacies. Increasing globalization has created a great need for people in the workforce who can communicate in multiple languages. Common languages are used in areas such as trade, tourism, international relations, technology, media, 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. However, some countries such as India, Singapore, Malaysia, Pakistan, and the Philippines use a second official language in their governments. According to GAO (2010), China has recently been putting enormous importance on foreign language learning, especially the English language. The need to learn foreign languages is as old as human history itself. In the Ancient Near East, Akkadian was the language of diplomacy, as in the Amarna letters. For many centuries, Latin was the dominant language of education, commerce, religion, and government in much of Europe, but it was displaced for many purposes 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 wrote 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 methods for teaching languages. He held that language acquisition must be allied with sensation and experience. Teaching must be oral. The schoolroom should have models of things, or else pictures of them. He published the world's first illustrated children's book, Orbis sensualium pictus. The study of Latin gradually diminished from the study of a living language to a mere subject in the school curriculum. This decline demanded a new justification for its study. It was then claimed that the study of Latin developed intellectual ability, 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. 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. 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 claiming to be a major improvement over the previous or contemporary methods. The earliest applied linguists included Jean Manes ca, 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. The history of foreign-language education in the 20th century and the methods of teaching (such as those related below) might appear to be a history of failure. Very few students in U.S. universities who have a foreign language as a major attain '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. This tends to make the research of second language acquisition emotionally charged. Older methods and approaches such as the grammar translation method and 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.