Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

International goals of teaching
Let us now turn to international goals for language teaching which extend beyond
the society itself, that is, the territory of supercentral languages such as Chinese and
The goals of language teaching 207

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the hypercentral language English, discussed in Chapter 10. The students are
assumed to be native speakers of the central language, possibly quite wrongly, say
when a person is teaching French in London to the typical multilingual class.
There are many types of international goals. Some illustrations will be taken from
English syllabuses for Japan (MEXT, 2003) and Malaysia (Pusat Perkembangan
Kurikulum, 2003), and the UK National Curriculum for modern languages 
(DES, 1990).
Careers that require a second language
Without taking into account the situation facing immigrants practising their orig-
inal profession in another country, such as Hungarian doctors practising in
England, there are many careers in which knowledge of another language is
important. For certain professions a particular language is necessary – for example,
English for air traffic controllers or seamen. The Angol Nyelv Alapfoken English
textbook in Hungary (Edina and Ivanne, 1987) has a plot-line about travel agents
and tourist guides, one kind of career that uses international languages. An impor-
tant function of language teaching is indeed to train people for the international
business world. Degrees in Japanese are popular among London University stu-
dents because they lead to jobs in the City of London, as it is apparently easier to
teach a Japanese graduate finance than a finance graduate Japanese. Nations will
always need individuals who are capable of bridging the gap between two coun-
tries for economic or political purposes, or indeed for the purposes of war, as in
the American crash programme in foreign languages in World War Two which led
to the audio-lingual method. This type of goal is not about turning the student
into an imitation native speaker, but into an L2 user. It preserves the first language
alongside the second so that the student can mediate between them – preparing an
L1 report on a meeting held in the second language, for example.