Brief Reflection on Past and Present

The Douglas Fir Group Framework as a Resource Map for Language Teacher Education

In This Issue

Focusing on Agnello and Orlando (1998), Elliger and Fink (1986), Weileder and Mayerhöfer (2013), Mihevc-Gabrovec (1978) and Keller and Russell (2012), I discuss attempts at introducing elements of Modern Greek into teaching its ancient predecessor. My analysis, which is based on the etymologies of LKN (Λεξικό της Κοινής Νεοελληνικής), shows that approximately half of the words in the textbooks investigated in this study retain the same written forms and meanings in Modern Greek as in Ancient Greek; the term word in this analysis subsumes headwords introducing lexical entries. On the other hand, words with the same written forms and different meanings in Ancient and Modern Greek are significantly less frequent, accounting for 5 to 11% of all words in the textbooks. Furthermore, these textbooks contain between 12 and 16% of words that retain the same meaning in Ancient and Modern Greek, and also show significant formal change. As a result, their written forms are different in Ancient than in Modern Greek. It is also found, however, that at least some inflected forms of the words belonging to the latter class retain in the modern language the same written forms and meanings as in Ancient Greek. These data suggest that it is possible to introduce elements of Modern Greek into teaching its ancient predecessor without drawing attention to grammatical and semantic differences between Ancient and Modern Greek. Based on these data I also evaluate at the end of the article existing attempts at incorporating elements of Modern Greek into teaching the ancient language.

A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages. Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World

This chapter is a didactic proposal for the teaching of Ancient Greek language and literature under an innovative and interdisciplinary approach. The history of teaching Ancient Greek shows different language acquisition methods that respond to the demands of their times, each of them with its advantages and disadvantages. The author combines diverse approaches to offer a new method for beginners in which students get involved in a stimulating practice that enables them to progress at the rhythm of their choice. The teaching materials are focused on real texts of Ancient Greek literature that work as starting point for an innovative and challenging language teaching for specific purposes approach. The final goal is to achieve student learning of Ancient Greek language through contextualized literary texts in order to get a better understanding of what Ancient Greek culture meant and why it has survived until today.

Teaching Korean as a Foreign Language: Theories and Practices

Learning and teaching languages in technology-mediated environments : why modes and meaning making matter

This paper discusses the ways polyglots study ancient languages. Understanding their methods helps to expand the inventory of effective linguo-didactic strategies. The relevance of this study is corroborated by the growing number of recent foreign publications devoted to the study of ancient languages by multilinguals. The introductory part of the article focuses on terminological differences between the concepts “polyglot” and “multilingual”. This issue is essential for selecting respondents participating in the study. Definitions of basic concepts are compared based on quantitative, value, ontological, teleological and behavioral criteria. The paper starts with the analysis of the interview with Maria Flaxman, a researcher of ancient Germanic languages. The discussion centers on how her experience of self-studying modern languages shaped her strategy for learning ancient languages. In the second part of the article the identified strategies are compared with the strategies of three other polyglots learning ancient languages. Altogether four polyglots (three men and one woman), who speak, in addition to many modern languages, several ancient languages (two to four languages), took part in the study. A comparison of their responses to a questionnaire, which included 21 points on quantitative and qualitative (age, period, value, behavioral and other) aspects, helped to reveal a number of general patterns, such as: ■ strong internal motivation; ■ the indispensable learning of Latin, regardless of the varying set of other ancient languages; ■ effectiveness of parallel study of modern and ancient languages; ■ the favorite ancient language for all respondents was the one in which they applied their individual strategies; ■ all respondents noted a reduction in the time it took to study their last ancient language compared to the first, as well as ■ the regularity of practicing these languages in the reading mode. The study, thus, makes a contribution to methods of acquiring ancient languages both within the framework of a university curriculum and in the process of self-study.

A question which occurs frequently to classical students and others concerns the relation between ancient and modern Greek. It is the purpose of the present article to indicate in as brief a fashion as possible the lines on which the question might be approached.Perhaps the most amazing thing about Greek is that in the period over which our written records extend—in over three millennia, since the decipherment of Linear B—it has changed so little. Whereas a student of Latin would be ill-equipped to read a modern Italian newspaper, a person with a good working knowledge of classical Greek would not only find an Athenian newspaper intelligible for the most part, but would be amazed at the remarkable likenesses between the ancient and the modern languages. For the vocabulary of a Greek newspaper is probably 99 per cent, of classical origin and modern Greek has retained much of the cumbersome grammar of the ancient language—and ancient Greek has got a cumbersome grammar, when we consider that its verb has over four hundred forms as compared to sixty or so in French and two in Afrikaans. Thus the declension of φίλος is precisely the same now (except for the absence of the dual, which was obsolescent in Xenophon's day, and of the dative) as it was in the fifth century B.c. The conjugation of the present of ἒχω is identical with that of the classical verb, although the third plural ending -ουσι occurs mostly dialectically, e.g. in Cypriot, and has been largely replaced by -ουν.

Contents: Foreword Introduction: Greek language-standardizing, past, present and future, Alexandra Georgakopoulou Part I Establishing a Standard: The invention of Greek: Macedonians, poets and others, Michael Silk The Greek koine and the logic of a standard language, Stephen Colvin Primary education teaching in a non-standard language as a tool of social and national integration: the case of vernacular Greek, 1923a 30, George Kritikos Greek with no models, history or standard: Muslim pontic Greek, Pietro Bortone. Part II Standardization Practices: The lexica of the 2nd sophistic: safeguarding Atticism, Claudia Strobel Grammatical metaphor and the function of participles in high-register versions of the Life of Aesop, Chrystalla Thoma Orthographic standardization of the modern Greek classics: gain and loss, David Ricks Correcting the courtroom cat: editorial assaults on Cavafy's poetry, Anthony Hirst Modern Greek dictionaries and the ideology of standardization, Assimakis Tseronis and Anna Iordanidou Greek in Cyprus: identity oscillations and language planning, Dimitra Karoulla-Vrikki 'Greeklish': transliteration practice and discourse in the context of computer-mediated digraphia, Jannis Androutsopoulos. Part III Ideologies and Contestations: A tradition of anomaly: towards the regularization of the Greek language, Emmanuel Kriaras Mother and daughters, roots and branches: modern Greek perceptions of the relationship between the ancient and modern languages, Peter Mackridge Constructing a science of language: linguistics and politics in 20th-century Greece, Effi Gazi 'Language issues' after the 'language question': on the modern standards of standard modern Greek, Spiros Moschonas Competing ideologies and post-diglossia Greek: analysing the discourse of contemporary' myth-breakers', Dionysis Goutsos Korais and the 2nd sophistic: the Hellenistic novel as paradigm for a modern literary language, Roderick Beaton Indexes.

English as Foreign Language (EFL) in East Asia involves major sociocultural issues. Modern, Western-based methodologies such as Communicative Language Learning (CLL, Communicative Language Teaching, CLT in this paper) and its further development Task-Based Language Learning and Teaching (TBLLT, Ellis, 2003), feature principles which can conflict with some of the fundamental values of Confucian Heritage Cultures (CHC) education and hinder their adoption in Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Hong-Kong and Vietnam. This article introduces a sociocultural, ethnographic perspective on EFL in East Asia which contextualizes language teaching in its broader educational and cultural environment. Teacher-centeredness, book and writing focuses, memorization strategies within a grammar-translation approach are in contradiction with modern language teaching methodologies’ focuses on learner-centeredness and teachers’ facilitating roles, student participation and interactions, communication competence and learner autonomy. The text advocates for a mean between Western and Eastern learning cultures through a context-based, culturally-sensitive approach and introduces classroom’s strategies for the implementation of CLL and TBLLT in China and East Asia. Keywords: Chinese culture of learning, Task-Based Language Teaching and Learning, Intercultural learning. Received: 2014–04–17 / Accepted: 2015–02–26 How to reference this article: Le Gal, D. & I. Chou, P. (2015). Resistant or favorable? Chinese learners' beliefs towards task–based language learning and teaching. Akala, Revista de Lenguaje y Cultura, 20 (1), 95–110. doi: 10.17533/udea.ikala.v20n1a06

The papers presented in this issue are the result of a workshop held at the University of Nottingham in December 2012 as part of an Arts and Humanities Research Council research network Towards a History of Modern Foreign Language Teaching and Learning (2012–14) intended to stimulate historical research into language teaching and learning. This, the first workshop in the programme, focused on exchanging information on the history of language learning and teaching (HoLLT) across the different language traditions, for it had become clear to us that scholars working within their own language disciplines were often relatively unaware of work outside these. We hope that this special issue — with overview articles on the history of English, French, German, and Spanish as second/foreign languages — will help overcome that lack of awareness and facilitate further research collaboration. Charting the history of language teaching and learning will, in turn, make us all better informed in facing challenges and changes to policy and practice now and in the future. It is instructive in the current climate, for example, to realize that grave doubts were held about whether second foreign languages could survive alongside French in British schools in the early twentieth century (McLelland, forthcoming), or to look back at earlier attempts to establish foreign languages in primary schools (Bayley, 1989; Burstall et al., 1974; Hoy, 1977). As we write, language learning in England is undergoing yet more radical change. Language teaching for all children from the age of seven is being made compulsory in primary schools from 2014, while at Key Stage 3 (up to age 16), where a foreign language has not been compulsory since 2002, the most recent programme of study for England has virtually abandoned the recent focus on intercultural competence and now requires learners to ‘read great literature in the original language’,1 a radical change in emphasis compared to the previous half-century, which seems to reflect a very different view of what language learning is for. We seem to be little closer in 2014 than we were at the dawn of the twentieth century to answering with any certainty the questions that lie at the very foundations of language teaching: who should learn a foreign language, why learners learn, what they need to learn, and what we want to teach them — answers that we need before we can consider how we want to teach. The research programme begun under our research network is intended to help us to take ‘the long view’ on such questions.

Language teaching came into its own as a profession in the twentieth century. The whole foundation of contemporary language teaching was developed during the early part of the twentieth century, as applied linguists and others sought to develop principles and procedures for the design of teaching methods and materials, drawing on the developing fields of linguistics and psychology to support a succession of proposals for what were thought to be more effective and theoretically sound teaching methods. Language teaching in the twentieth century was characterized by frequent change and innovation and by the development of sometimes competing language teaching ideologies. Much of the impetus for change in approaches to language teaching came about from changes in teaching methods. The method concept in teaching – the notion of a systematic set of teaching practices based on a particular theory of language and language learning – is a powerful one, and the quest for better methods was a preoccupation of many teachers and applied linguists throughout the twentieth century. Common to each method is the belief that the teaching practices it supports provide a more effective and theoretically sound basis for teaching than the methods that preceded it. The chapters in Part I examine the developments that led to the first major paradigm in modern language teaching – the adoption of grammar-based teaching methods that came to be known as the structural approach or Situational Language Teaching in the United Kingdom, and Audiolingualism in the United States. In Chapter 1 we outline the historical precedents to language teaching in the first part of the twentieth century.

The present paper offers a modest contribution to the existing and ongoing attempt to find a place for narrative research in language education. The purpose is mainly to explore and highlight insights gleaned from narrative research with regard to narrative data and analysis. Due to the diverse and unique nature of second language learning and teaching, I would argue that gathering narrative data from second language learners are paramount and in line with the existing attempt to view second language teaching and learning in its own right and not as imitation of first language learning. To develop my argument, I will first discuss the position of narrative research in second language education highlighting the contribution and insights that narrative research brings to second language teaching and learning. I will proceed to define narrative research and explains the various tools to elicit narrative data as well as issues that narrative researcher needs to consider when collecting narrative data. The paper ends by looking at issues and strategies in analyzing narrative data. In all of the discussion, relevant research is cited to illustrate the point being discussed. The paper will end by highlighting that the discussion about narrative data and analysis are not aimed to replace other tools of data elicitation and analysis. Rather, it aims to invite teachers and researchers to see narratives as a viable option in research as the methodology continues to move forward.

This paper addresses the case for collaboration between English and modern languages teachers and researchers in teaching and learning languages. The British context is set out against a background of government initiatives to raise secondary pupils' literacy skills. Salient trends in the teaching approach of English (L1) and modern language (ML) teachers are compared and contrasted in order to identify pedagogic concerns. To date, these concerns tend to focus on the teaching of grammar. Teachers' divergent views on the issue is one factor impeding greater collaboration between them. The learning strategy research field is presented as an alternative area of commonality. This research stresses developing 'how to learn' skills with pupils. Memorisation and reading strategies are compared across L1and ML to illustrate the potential for collaboration in making explicit links between the two areas of language learning. A strategy research agenda is identified with a view to establishing how recent policy changes offer the potential to explore more effective ways to impact on language teaching and learning.