Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Central goals of teaching
The central goals of language teaching are those that serve the needs of the 
society within itself, particularly the need for different groups to interact with
each other. They can be seen as having three broad divisions, drawing on the 

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distinctions made in Bilingualism or Not (Skutnabb-Kangas, 1981): assimilationist,
transitional and language maintenance. All these are concerned with the position
of minority language children relative to the majority language, that is to say,
with speakers of a local language learning the central language for use in the wider
community.
Assimilationist language teaching
Assimilationist teaching accepts that society has the right to expect people to give
up their native languages and to become speakers of the central language; they are
to be assimilated into the rest of the country. One example has been the five-
month courses teaching Hebrew to new immigrants to Israel. Here the motivation
was to unify people coming from many parts of the world within a single cultural
heritage, though this is now changing into vocationally more relevant teaching.
UK governments constantly threaten to make residence depend on the ability 
to speak English. An extreme form of assimilationist teaching is so-called ‘submer-
sion’ teaching – the ‘sink-or-swim’ method of ‘mainstreaming’ minority language
children into a central language classroom and forbidding them to use their own
language.
Transitional language teaching
The aim of transitional L2 teaching is to allow people to function in the central
language of the country, without necessarily losing or devaluing their first lan-
guage. While resembling assimilationist teaching, the motivation is different. To
use Wallace Lambert’s terms (Lambert, 1990), assimilationist teaching is ‘subtrac-
tive’ in that the learners feel their first language is being taken away from them;
transitional teaching is ‘additive’ in that it adds the ability to function in the
majority language without displacing the first language. With transitional lan-
guage teaching, the minority language speaker still keeps the right to function in
his or her own language, except when communicating with the majority group.
The educational system is one aspect of this. In some countries education takes
place almost exclusively through the central official language: English in England,
French in France. Hence those who do not speak the language of the school need
help in acquiring it. In other countries, special classes enable children to acquire
the majority language for the classroom. The Bilingual Education Act in the USA,
for example, required the child to have English teaching as an aid in the transition
to the ordinary classroom. François Grosjean (1982) says of such classes: ‘For a few
years at least the children can be in a transitory haven before being “swallowed
up” by the regular system.’ Ironically, such schemes disappeared in the UK follow-
ing the Calderdale report finding that separate provision contravenes laws against
racial discrimination (Commission for Racial Equality, 1986), thus imposing an
assimilationist model on education in England that has lasted ever since. Indeed,
this mainstreaming of the immigrant child with some language support is now
widespread across Europe, for example, in Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Cyprus,
Austria, Portugal and Poland (Eurydice, 2005).
Employment is another aspect. Schemes are set up to help the worker who does
not know the language of the workplace; new adult immigrants to Sweden, for
example, must be offered the opportunity to study Swedish by their local munic-
ipality within three months. Sometimes the needs of the new adult immigrant are
taken care of by special initial programmes. The aim of such transitional teaching
The goals of language teaching
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is not to suppress the first language in the minority language speakers, but to
enable them to use the central language sufficiently for their own educational or
employment needs. They still keep the values of their first language for all func-
tions except those directly involving speakers of the majority language.