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Summaries Teaching Styles Chapter 11

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Language and Groups

  • Language users are members of many possible groups ranging from the family up to the nation.

  • Many groups are genuinely multilingual rather than monolingual.

  • It is crucial to see L2 users as belonging to many groups and as being part of a new group of L2 users rather than as supplicants to join native speaker groups.

 

 

The goals of teaching language

Central goals foster a second language within a society

·        assimilationist language teaching: minority speakers learn the majority central language and relinquish their first language

·        transitional language teaching: minority speakers learn to function in the majority central language for some purposes without giving up the first language

·        language maintenance and bilingual language teaching: minority speakers learn to function in both languages

International goals foster a second language for use outside the society

  • careers that require a second language

  • higher education

  • access to research and information

  • travel

Individual goals develop qualities in the learner rather than language per se:

  • understanding of foreign cultures

  • understanding language itself

  • cognitive training

  • general educational values

  • learning the second lang­uage as an academic subject

  • L2 learning as social change