Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

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11.3 The goals of language teaching
The goals of language teaching 205
Box 11.2 Language and groups
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Language users are members of many possible groups, ranging from the
family to the nation.
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Many groups are genuinely multilingual rather than monolingual.
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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.
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Do you think people who go to live in another country should either learn the
majority language and forget their own or adopt the majority language for
some everyday purposes, or try to keep both the majority language and their
L1 going?
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What goals do you or your students have for their second language outside
their own country? Careers? Education? Access to information? Travel?
Focusing questions
assimilationist teaching: teaching that expects people to give up their native
languages and to become speakers of the majority central language of the
country
transitional L2 teaching: teaching that allows people to function in a central
language, without necessarily losing or devaluing the first language
language maintenance and bilingual language teaching: teaching to main-
tain or extend the minority local language within its own group
submersion teaching: extreme sink-or-swim form of assimilationist teaching in
which minority language children are put in majority language classes
Keywords
What does this diversity of functions and group memberships mean for L2 learn-
ing and teaching? We can make a broad division between central goals which fos-
ter the second language within the country, international goals which foster it for
use outside the country and individual goals which aim at developing the potential
of the individual learner.