PERSPECTIVES ON TEACHING ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE. ARE TEACHERS READY TO GIVE UP THE PAST?

Abstract

From times immemorial, the teaching and learning of foreign languages has been under the attention of scholars from all over the world. Firstly, Greek and Latin were seen as foreign languages that needed to be learnt if one wanted to be literate and educated. Further on, especially in Latin countries, French replaced Greek and Latin. The methods of acquiring the foreign language have also changed. Nowadays, English has become the lingua franca of our generation. But unlike Greek and Latin which were learnt to enable one to read classic masterpieces in the original, English is learnt for communication purposes. Thus, the methods of teaching a foreign language have been subject to tremendous changes, especially in the 20th century. One method replaced the other, each one was considered better than the previous one and teachers changed their way of teaching according to the latest research and tradition in the field of methodology. But the question that arises is whether this actually happens in the classroom too. Do teachers teach according to one method or is their manner of teaching a mixture of different teaching approaches? In our study, we want to prove that a foreign language teaching is an excursion into the history of foreign language teaching.