The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Second Edition - E.M. Rickerson
How have our ideas about language learning changed through the years?
The Five-Minute Linguist - Bite-sized Essays on Language and Languages Second Edition - E.M. Rickerson
June K. Phillips [+]
Weber State University
June K. Phillips is Professor and Dean of Arts & Humanities Emeritus from Weber State University in Utah. She has taught French (at the junior high school through college levels) and methods of foreign language teaching. She served as President of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) in 2001. She was ACTFL’s project director for the National Standards for Foreign Language Education and was co-director of a project looking at their influence after a decade or more; she also co-chaired the development of Program Standards for the Preparation of Foreign Language Teachers, jointly promulgated by ACTFL and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education. She served as a consultant to the National Assessment of Educational Progress evaluation of Spanish teaching in the U.S. and to the WGBH/Annenberg Video Library for Foreign Languages, a nonprofit educational resource. She has published and edited extensively on pedagogical topics.
Description
Seventeenth-century arrivals in America learned to communicate in native American languages as a matter of survival. However, later settlers built schools that taught languages for academic purposes. Language study in eighteenth-century America meant learning to read and write Ancient Greek or Latin, or both. With the start of World War Two and later with the Cold War, as the US government was in need of foreign language specialists, more people learned more languages faster and more fluently. In the twenty-first century, communication-first paradigm is used a strategy for improving language programs.