Talk:Language education

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 22 January 2019 and 8 May 2019. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Yanxu0914.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 02:11, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Splitting 19th and 20th century

I briefly read over the 19th and 20th century section and it look like it splits off from the main section in the last 2 paragraphs. As it looks like it goes into branches of language education and that would probably be best in a separate section altogether. We might want to consider splitting that up to enhance readability and make less daunting. As well as to help organize and split up information. -Vexthesmol (talk) 17:53, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Proprioceptive method

I added this as a link to the main article on this method.

Languagewatch (talk) 21:02, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

external links

I'm not very happy with the latest addition to the external links, "Learn Spanish in Mexico". This seems to be nothing but an advertisement and shouldn't be included in Wikipedia. Comments? <KF> 14:31, 20 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I'm not happy with any of the external links. Links to providers of EAL training are not useful. We are not a web directory. There are thousands of such sites and links to them are not useful or informative here. I suggest we do not link to any. I've added a link to the relevant ODP category instead. Angela. 03:41, Jan 23, 2004 (UTC)

"Around the World"

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    Verified as historic, removed from contents. Robbiemuffin (talk) 02:52, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

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Since when was Europe the world?--ZayZayEM 02:15, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

plagiarism?

Either a large section of this has been copied BY another site, or a large section of this has been copied FROM another site. See [1] under Methods of Teaching Foreign Languages. 16:50, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Scroll to the bottom of the page. All's good.: "The source of this article is Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL. For a change history, click here" samwaltz 11:45, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Pimsleur Advertisement?

The stuff on Pimsleur sounds like an advertisement. It needs to be shortened and sound less like "I bought it, so should you!"

This is unsigned and the paragraph on Pimsleur seems to now be in line with the rest. Robbiemuffin (talk) 02:56, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

The nature of CLT

You write: "(CLT) is an approach to the teaching of second and foreign languages that emphasizes interaction as both the means and the ultimate goal of learning a language. Despite the widespread failure of CLT to produce excellent results, it continues to be popular, particularly in Europe, where constructivist views on language learning and education in general dominate academic discourse." Now this is absolutely vital, but has no evidence to back it up. What studies have been done comparing the success of different language methods? It happens that I think CLT is useless,as it imparts no language regularities , i.e. grammar, but I believe it is prevalent due to the social class origins and hence cultural values: - fun, play,instant gratification, post-1968 "creativity" - of the (mainly) women who teach modern languages and are easy meat for the fraudulent publishing houses looking to make a buck by promising this season´s "Teaching Success on earth, now on DVD".

Now the text is more NPOV-friendly but it still lacks a reference. I'm going to put a citation needed flag in there. Robbiemuffin (talk)

Belgium's Frenchspeaking community

The article seems to give correct about information about the Dutchspeaking part of Belgium. I would find it very interesting to read something about the education of Dutch and English in the other part too.(age,etc..) Evilbu 14:00, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

codeswitching is particularly effective for L1 English speakers?

this last sentence in the codeswitching section needs a citation at the very least Glennh70 16:32, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

Just a note that that's long gone now. Robbiemuffin (talk) 03:06, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

I think it should say on what grounds code switching is "discouraged"

Mark Matthew Dalton (talk) 02:22, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

I think it's frustrating not to know why. I don't know, by the way. Mark Matthew Dalton (talk) 02:30, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

New Language education on the Internet section

This section smacks of SEO - it is basically an excuse to link several commercial and borderline commercial websites with a few free site thrown in to make it difficult to argue against removing the section altogether. Wikipedia is not a directory and I recommend removing the external links from this section or linking only to free services. People are welcome to search the internet for commercial services - linking to them from this article does not improve the content and it would be impossible to say which links should be kept and which should go. Nposs 22:49, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

I've just removed the external links from the new section, and I find that it does not diminish the content of the section. Nposs 23:10, 15 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm thinking of re-titling the Internet section to address "Self-study" more generally, which is not covered elsewhere in the article yet. It is worth at least noting there are many self-study books and CDs available which, like the Internet portals, offer teaching outside schools. The "Methods" section currently starts, "Language education may take place as a general school subject or in a specialized language school." I would drop or expand that sentence, which really addresses location, more than method. Any thoughts? Numbersinstitute (talk) 22:00, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

I did change internet section to add self-study. Now I'm thinking of re-organizing a bit more. Methods section addresses classroom teaching, and includes "Approaches" as well as "Techniques," so I may retitle it as "Teaching foreign languages in classrooms", with clearer order of Approaches, Methods, Techniques. Then I'll put the internet/self-study section next, as a balance to the classroom section, but I will simplify its subsections, since it has more detailed subheadings than rest of article.Numbersinstitute (talk) 05:09, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

telescope rule

I think we should mention in this "Language education" article the WikiWikiWeb:TelescopeRule: the counter-intuitive idea that the best way to learn some given foreign language in 4 years is to first spend a year learning Esperanto, then 3 years learning the desired language.

I wouldn't believe it myself if I hadn't seen Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto.

--68.0.120.35 21:25, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

ANY language? you mean some european language used to construct espoeranto, no? How could possibly help it when someone wants to learn for example Chinese?00:26, 29 July 2007 (UTC)88.101.76.122

I agree that it seems counter-intuitive that learning Esperanto would help learning Chinese. But that doesn't make it false. After all, it seems counter-intuitive that it takes less time to learn Esperanto and then French that it does to learn French all by itself -- and yet that's what the studies listed at Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto show.

I would be happy to learn of any study that that definitely showed, one way or another: How does learning Esperanto effect learning Chinese? --68.0.120.35 20:16, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

In the above link, the EKPAROLI project (Melbourne, Australia, 1994-2000) is the only one listed regarding East Asian languages. It had some good conclusions, but they stop well short of making a direct claim like "has similar benefits". Some language teachers I knew from back at school felt the studies were destined to mislead: teachers are inspired by the project, on small scales like these they are intrinsically biased.

Another, serious question is, what is the Propaedeutic value of [insert other language here?].

While Esperanto can be taught to a higher degree of proficiency, it is because it is a simple, model language. In fact its power comes from the fact that it is those things. As such, it is probably useful to anyone who wants to study language, but the claim that it is better in general for L2 should be viewed with skepticism. — It's been about 100 years since the first of these studies, the fact that it isn't already the de facto standard in all education curriculums should be a pretty good indicator of the limits of its possible value. Robbiemuffin (talk)

Language education in Australia

It is inflammatory to call the arrival of Europeans in Australia as an "invasion". It is unnecessary in this article to even mention it. All the article has to start with is "Prior to 1788... etc". To be more expansive for the non-Australian reader it might have to say "Prior to 1788, before Europeans arrived permanently on the Australian continent... etc". Lets keep it unbiased as possible thanks.

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I think the article (NOT the title) should indeed be posted under L2-teaching, but I think many things should be considered. Firstly, the title "Language Education" (LE), to my interpretation, is meant as it is: the teaching of ANY language. However, there are many different aspects we have to include here. L2 teaching, independent which language we will acquire, is just an aspect of the whole chapter of LE. Mother tongue (or L1) teaching is also LE, isn't it? After all, in which educational system the native tongue isn't taught? Also, we have to approach L2 differently depending the political situation. As mentioned before, in Belgium, as well as in other multi-language countries, the teaching of an L2 (or even L3 and L4) will have different (political) objectives and goals. But yet, the whole package is part of LE teaching. Therefore it might be handy to divide this chapter into the different aspects that LE embraces: not only the L2/LX teaching, but everything included: semantics, grammar, linguistics, etc. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Pietrubens (talk • contribs) 17:01, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

Merge with SLA?

I don't know whose idea this was, but it wasn't mine and I strongly disagree. See here for why. -- Hoary 09:15, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

the grammar translation method

Yolgnu notes: rv. it isn't spoken, not because we don't know how it was spoken, but because, lacking native speakers, there is no need to speak it

Which is exactly what I learned too (regarding latin and to a lesser degree some stages of greek). But it doesn't matter for the purposes of this article. It's fun to speculate on how well our teaching methods mirrored the language in some moment in time, or some average of several moments ... but that is not the place for wikipedia, that is (at it's best) original research. It also belongs in the section on dead languages, in my opinion, and less so here.

What I wrote does not contradict the primacy of our linguistic understanding of the oral tradition of latin. It avoids the issue entirely, allowing the reader to focus on what the article is supposed to be about; the grammar translation method. — robbiemuffin ^{page talk} 12:19, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

right now I have the section as (emphasis here is for purposes of the discussion):

It is used by many Latin teachers, since a dead language lacks native speakers and so does not have the same abundancy of source for its oration (although there is certainly an understanding of how Latin was spoken).

I would like to be rid of the emphasized section, but that would revert it to my initial change, which was reverted because of the modern educational history of latin. — robbiemuffin ^{page talk} 12:23, 24 June 2008 (UTC)

Global views

I will work on getting more global views of language education. The US information is very useful and I will keep verifying. I can add more about European developments and Asian developments and trends. Any help will be appreciated. Thx. LK Lam Kin Keung (talk) 03:33, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

PPP

"All but unknown"??? PPP remains the base method taught in the CELTA and TESOL certificates —Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.122.153.243 (talk) 08:32, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Audio-Lingual Method

I quote from Language education#The audio-lingual method:

"The audio-lingual method was developed around World War II when governments realized that they needed more people who could conduct conversations fluently in a variety of languages, work as interpreters, code-room assistants, and translators. However, since foreign language instruction in that country was heavily focused on reading instruction, no textbooks, other materials or courses existed at the time, so new methods and materials had to be devised."

Regarding the text "in that country", is this referring to the USA? It's not made clear in the text. — Mr. Stradivarius ^♫ 03:20, 8 November 2010 (UTC)

Splitting up the article

I propose splitting the article up into sections. Here are my ideas for the sub-articles:

• History of language education
• Methods of teaching foreign languages
  • I think this should be shortened, with more emphasis on the individual articles of teaching methods
• Language learning strategies
  • This article could also be linked to from second language acquisition
• Language education by region

The rest can stay in the article as it is, I think. Does this sound like a good plan? — GypsyJiver (drop me a line) 23:46, 9 November 2010 (UTC)

I'd like to see a section devoted to methods of teaching language that are not well-known to the typical language teacher, for example because the methods are so new, or because they just never really got out of the lab so to speak. Mark Matthew Dalton (talk) 02:35, 23 June 2013 (UTC)

Merger proposal

I propose that Second language learning be merged with a few different articles, including this one. The contents of Second language learning is already covered in several different places, notably:

• Second language acquisition for "Individual differences"
• Monitor theory, Comprehensible input and Acquisition-learning hypothesis for Krashen's theories
• Language education for the history of language learning
• English as a foreign or second language for the parts about learning English.

Because of this significant overlap, I don't think there is a need for a specific article on Second language learning. The general introduction for the subject is already covered in Language education and Second language acquisition. I suggest redirecting it to Language education after merging the content into the relevant articles. — GypsyJiver (drop me a line) 06:44, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

I agree. Redirect to Second Language Acquisition. I'm not sure what there is to merge. The SLA page has "second language learning" as an alternative title. VsevolodKrolikov (talk) 06:55, 21 November 2010 (UTC) (I moved this comment from the original talk page.) — GypsyJiver (drop me a line) 07:02, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Thinking about it, you're right - a redirect to Second language acquisition is probably better, as it deals with the subject more directly. — GypsyJiver (drop me a line) 07:20, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Ok, I've finished the merge. The only material I found that could actually be merged was about half of the History section, and I put that in Language education#Need for language education. Even this is a bit iffy, but I put it in anyway in case people think it's worth improving. Second language learning now redirects to Second language acquisition. — GypsyJiver (drop me a line) 16:05, 22 November 2010 (UTC)

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An update is direly needed:

Google Trends: Language Teaching + Learning http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=language+learning,language+teaching,virtual+worlds

In 2010 Second Life was de-listed by the Immersive Education Initiative, and replaced by Open Simulator and realXtend, for the following reasons http://immersiveeducation.org/go/iED_Article_Taking_The_Initiative_CGW.html

What about this Grid? Access to the Education Grid is available to members of the Immersive Education Initiative http://theeducationgrid.org/

Education Grid http://theeducationgrid.org/About_The_Education_Grid.html

Immersive Education Initiative iED Educational Requirements http://mediagrid.org/groups/

Immersive Education Technology Group (IETG) : Education Grid Requirements Specification http://mediagrid.org/groups/technology/grid.ied/specification/index.html - Item 2.1: No “Vendor Lock-In” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_lock-in - Vendor Lock-In Remedy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vendor_Relationship_Management

ABSTRACTS 1st European Immersive Education Summit (iED Summit) http://members.immersiveeducation.org/abstracts_Spain_Summit

--93.222.177.38 (talk) 06:39, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Merger of Metaverses + Gamification

An update is needed:

1. As of 2012, the merger of metaverse + gamification functions have progressed to enable low-cost game options (one-time pricing) by using Minecraft (check for Learning Russian with Minecraft on YouTube), and Linden Lab's copycat called Patterns, which is poised to be distributed by the gamer management & procurement platform Steam_(software) offering many more gamer training tools.

--93.222.177.38 (talk) 06:40, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

I find the proposed wording above is hard for me to follow. I do appreciate the contributor opening the discussion here on the talk page, avoiding repeated reversions. First the suggested text mentions "metaverse + gamification" with a link that does not explain them. Do these mean the same as "virtual worlds" and "online games" as mentioned in the previous paragraph? If so an encyclopedia would keep terms consistent. If not, try explaining here on the talk page. Second the text goes on to comment about cost, which has not been discussed on any other specific numbered paragraph. There's a general mention in the following, closing, paragraph. It seems good to keep only the general mention, unless one can discuss costs in a good way for each alternative. Third the text mentions Minecraft and Linden Lab, as examples and Steam as a sales platform. Are these simply examples that could be added along with "Second Life" in the previous paragraph? Are they the best current examples? Is there some reason to mention Steam as a sales channel, when we do not mention Amazon, iTunes, or the many other sales channels for language-learning materials? Numbersinstitute (talk) 00:53, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Ireland as an exception to foreign languages

• Quote for the article:

By 1998 nearly all pupils in Europe studied at least one foreign language as part of their compulsory education, the only[citation needed] exception being the Republic of Ireland, where primary and secondary schoolchildren learn both Irish and English, but neither is considered a foreign language although a third European language is also taught.

• End quote.

As far as I can tell, this (convoluted) text tries to explain that because Ireland teaches two official languages and a third, foreign language, Ireland does not teach a foreign language.

If my interpretation is correct, the statement is obviously wrong (A AND B => !A)==FALSE.

Eroen (talk) 17:04, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Improvement of native language

To Allformweek - I noticed you removed much of the summary, including the statement "It can include improving a learner's mastery of her or his native language". I think this is referring to things like the English Language classes and English Literature classes that I received at secondary school in the UK, and I don't think there is anything controversial about saying that that can be included in a definition of language education. Maybe we can change the wording in a way that can makes this meaning more obvious? I'd like to hear your thoughts. — Mr. Stradivarius (drop me a line) 23:29, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

Wrong scope or title

Shouldn't "Language education" talk about language education in general instead that on "second language education"? I suggest changing the title to "Second language education" or "Foreign language education". Saying that language education refers to second language education is unfair. Schools devote much more time to first language education than to second language education. I imagine there could be a different article called "Language education" covering both first and second language or more general issues. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.57.151.183 (talk) 13:24, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

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