Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Discussion topics
1 Think of what you did or saw done the last time you visited a class. Would
you say the terms to characterize it best were ‘techniques’, ‘approaches’,
‘styles’, or something else?
2 To what extent does the academic style incorporate traditional values of
education, say, those held by the man in the street or government
ministries, compared to the values of other styles?
3 What aspects of the audio-lingual style are still practised today (whatever
they are actually called)?
4 To what extent do students carry over the ability to communicate socially
from their first language to their second?
5 If communicative teaching is about transferring ‘information’, what
information do you feel should be conveyed during the language lesson?
6 Should classroom tasks in fact relate to the world outside the classroom?
7 Does task-based learning represent a whole new method of language
teaching or is it just a way of organizing some aspects of teaching?
8 In what ways do you think language teaching has changed in the past 70
years, so far as the average classroom is concerned?
9 Does teaching an ‘alternative’ style mean adopting an ‘alternative’ set of values?
10 Which aspect of SLA research have you found most useful for language
teaching? Which have you found least useful?
Discussion topics 271

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Further reading
The models are best approached through the main texts cited in each section,
namely Lado, Rivers, Curran, and so on. Any modern teaching methodology book
should cover the more recent methods, such as Ur (1996) A Course in Language
Teaching. For TBL, Willis and Willis (2007) Doing Task-based Teaching, is good value.
The two articles by Swan (1985, 2005) should remind people to moderate their
enthusiasm for new teaching methods, by taking practical issues into consideration.
Second language learning and language teaching styles