While more people than ever before are learning foreign languages in public

While more people than ever before are learning foreign languages in public and private institutions, there are three striking sources of inefficiency in modern teaching, to which both the teachers and students should attach more importance and which can help to avoid more mistakes. First, while language provides a means of saying and doing things, teaching is generally divorced from the use we make of language. We teach an unapplied system, rather than teaching students directly to do things that they need to do through language. Second, language is a social tool used by thinking social individuals. Nevertheless, we teach students to do and say things with language which are fundamentally insignificant to them as persons, and consequently they say these things formally and impersonally. A third great source of inefficiency is due to an effort to teach all the students in a group at the same rate. We acknowledge that this is unfair to the capable student, but we probably do not realize the unfairness to the slow student, who’s often taken as being unintelligent. There’s no evidence that slow students are necessarily unintelligent, or that unintelligent students are incapable of learning a language. With properly designed courses, students, free to move at their own normal rate, learning to do what they need to with the language, while committing themselves as persons, can rise to unprecedented levels of competence.