Language education refers to the processes and practices of teaching a second or foreign language. Its study reflects interdisciplinary approaches, usually including some applied linguistics. There are four main learning categories for language education: communicative competencies, proficiencies, cross-cultural experiences, and multiple literacies.
Need 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, 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. Further, the governments of some countries have more than one official language; such countries include India, Singapore, Malaysia, Pakistan, and the Philippines. According to the GAO (2010), China has recently been placing greater emphasis on foreign language learning, especially English.
History
Ancient to medieval period Ancient learners seem to have started by reading, memorizing, and reciting little stories and dialogues that provided basic vocabulary and grammar in naturalistic contexts. These texts seem to have emphasized coherence rather than isolated sentences, such as those modern learners often practice. They covered topics such as getting dressed in the morning (and how to manage the enslaved people 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). The texts were presented bilingually in two narrow columns, the language you were learning on the left and the one you already knew on the right, with the columns matching line for line: Each line was effectively a glossary, while each column was a text. 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. In the Ancient Near East, Akkadian was the language of diplomacy, as in the Amarna letters. For many centuries, Latin had been the dominant language of education, commerce, religion, and government in much of the Western world. By the end of the 16th century, it had largely been displaced by French, Italian, and English. 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 sensualium pictus. The study of Latin diminished from a study of a living language to be used in the real world to a subject in the school curriculum. Such a decline brought about 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 their grammar study by adding rhetoric.
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 the same, 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.
19th and 20th centuries
Innovation in foreign language teaching began in the 19th century and accelerated in the 20th century. It led to many different, sometimes conflicting methods, each claiming to be a major improvement over 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 establishing language-teaching principles and approaches grounded in linguistic and psychological theories, but they left many practical details for others to develop. 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 major in a foreign language attain "minimum professional proficiency." Even the "reading knowledge" required for a PhD degree is comparable only to that of second-year language students, and very few native English-speaking researchers can read and assess information written in languages other than English. However, anecdotal evidence of successful second or foreign language learning is easy to find, creating a discrepancy with the failure of many language education 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, may be dismissed and even ridiculed as newer methods and approaches are invented and promoted as solutions to the problem of high failure rates among foreign language students.
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