Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Individual goals of language teaching
Some goals are not related to the society itself or its external relations, but to the
students’ motivations and attitudes examined in Chapter 8. Several individual
goals can be recognized.
Understanding foreign cultures
The Japanese syllabus ‘aims at instilling a broader perspective and an understand-
ing of different cultures, fostering attitudes of respect for such ideas, and the abil-
ity to live with people of different cultures’. The UK National Curriculum wants
pupils to ‘be taught about different countries and cultures by communicating
with native speakers’, and by ‘considering the experiences and perspectives of
people in these countries and communities’. Regardless of the actual language
that is being learnt, it is often held to be beneficial for the students to understand
a foreign culture for its own sake.
Understanding language itself
An educated person should know something of how language itself works as part
of the human mind and of society. One of the four main goals of the UK National
Curriculum (DES, 1990) is ‘Acquiring knowledge and understanding of the target
language’. This can be gained through foreign language study or through language
awareness training.
Cognitive training
The virtue of learning a classical language such as Latin was held to be that it trained
the brain. The logical and reasoning powers of the mind were enhanced through a
second language. This is supported by research which shows that children who
speak two languages are more flexible at problem solving (Ben Zeev, 1977), and are
better able to distinguish form from meaning (Ianco-Worrall, 1972). Ellen Bialystok
(1990), for example, asked children to say which was the biggest word in such pairs
as ‘hippopotamus’ and ‘skunk’; bilinguals were better able to keep the word size dis-
tinct from the object size and to answer the question correctly. After one hour a
week of Italian for five months, English-speaking ‘bilingual’ children were learning
to read better than their peers (Yelland et al., 1993). One spin-off from learning any
language is indeed the beneficial effects of L2 learning on using the first language. If
children are deficient at listening for information, the skills involved can be devel-
oped through L2 teaching.
The goals of language teaching 209

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