Modern Language Teaching [antikvár]

ON FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING AT T.I.T. The entire framework of foreign language teaching in the nineteenth century was a combination of three objectives. During the past hundred years the nature of teaching and learning foreign languages has under gone both a quantitative and a qualitative change. While in the past the goal of language learning was, on the one hand, basically formal /it was regarded as a device for mind-training/, on the other hand, foreign languages were learned in order to know more about the culture of another people. That is, the aim of language learning was to obtain information concerning a country. Thus, the practical objective of acquiring knowledge of a foreign language was not emphasized and was therefore of only tertiary importance. In the present age the objectives have been restructured and have increased in number. The tasks of mind-training and problem solving have been taken over by mathematics. The acquisition of knowledge concerning a country, while maintaining its role as an objective, has become a method as well. The earlier tertiary objective, that of a means of international communication and friendship among peoples, has today become the primary practical objective of foreign language teaching and has a well-defined scientific and methodological foundation. This unified and important social system of objectives contains a set of subordinate objectives. The waiter, the engineer, the receptionist, the interpreter,and the teacher, for example will 3