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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
The aim of this book has been to examine the language teaching matrix – that is, the interactions between teachers, learners, the curriculum, classroom activities, and instructional materials – and to try to account for how different aspects of this process can be described, planned, implemented, and monitored. In doing so, I looked at some of the key issues that shape the field of second and foreign language teaching. Language teaching, somewhat more than other areas of educational focus, has been subject to constant changing enthusiasm for different “solutions” to the language teaching challenge. Typically, however, innovators focus on a single dimension of what is inevitably a multidimensional phenomenon. As Clark (1985: 6) puts it:
Much unnecessary confusion has been created by those who have thought the solution to the language curriculum problem could be found in one part of the jigsaw to the exclusion of other parts. Thus, panaceas have been sought in methodology alone, or in catch-all technological aids … or in ‘graded tests’, as if assessment by itself could improve the teaching/learning process, or in the elaboration of ever more complex syllabuses such as the various Threshold documents, or in studies of second language acquisition, or the impressionistic global descriptions of proficiency at different levels.
My own view is likewise that the field of second and foreign language teaching requires a comprehensive view of how successful learning and teaching is planned for and accomplished in educational settings. This perspective involves approaching language teaching as a particular case of educational program design.
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