Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

education through an L2
Another group of L2 users are gaining an education through a second language, as
we saw earlier. On the one hand, they may be another L2 minority island in an L1
sea; in the Netherlands, universities use English alongside Dutch. In reverse, stu-
dents go to another country to get their higher education, Zaireans to Paris,
Greeks to England. In other words, a second language is the vehicle for education,
more or less regardless of its native speakers (except in so far as they can profit by
teaching ‘their’ language). Within this general framework comes the elite bilin-
gualism of children educated in multilingual schools.
Pupils and teachers learning or teaching L2 in school
Finally, children are taught a second language as part of the school curriculum –
the classic ‘foreign’ language situation, whether French in England or Spanish in
Japan. The children do not themselves form a community of users – perhaps the
only group we can really call ‘learners’ rather than users. Often the goal is to get
through the hurdles set by the examination system – language as a school subject,
taught and assessed like other subjects. Members of this group are unique in not
having an L2 identity of their own; their use is not an end in itself so much as the
route to getting somewhere else.
Doubtless many other groups could be added, for example, interpreters,
whether professionals or children helping their parents, a widespread use in
minority groups. Some use the second language to native speakers, some to other
non-native speakers. The goal of becoming a native speaker or even understand-
ing a native speaker is beside the point; the aim is to become an efficient L2 user.
Separating community from the monolingual native speaker leads to new group-
ings of speakers. Moreover an individual may have multiple memberships in these
groups: a professional footballer coming to London needs not just the visitor 
language to cope with living there, but also the specialized ELF of football for
interacting with the rest of the team (Kellerman et al., 2005) – 60 per cent of
league footballers in England at the time of writing (2008) are non-native speak-
ers of English.
The goals of language teaching