Personalizing Foreign Language Instruction

Foreign language enrollments are declining. This decline may be due, in part, to the lack of relevance of foreign languages to students' current concerns and problems. As a result, teachers may have to change their thinking about the role of foreign languages in the curriculum. In a humane curriculum, foreign languages have the important role of helping students examine their lives, their values, and their ways of thinking. This kind of curriculum may necessitate giving up “covering the book.” Teachers will have to learn new teaching strategies and techniques to help students examine their beliefs, values, interests, and concerns. To accomplish this goal, techniques from humanistic education and values clarification can be used in the target language to help students answer such questions as Who am I? and What do I want to become? These techniques, however, are not gimmicks to be used to “kill time.” They must be used purposefully if the goals of humanistic education are to be reached in the language classroom

Curriculum · Foreign language · Humanism · Humanistic education · Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Political science · Relevance (law · Education and Critical Thinking Development · EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning · Psychology · Second Language Learning and Teaching

• The Individualization of Instruction in ESL

  Richard A Henry•TESOL Quarterly•1975

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• Getting Them All into the Act

  Open Access•Elaine K Horwitz•Foreign Language Annals•1985

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• The Communicative Language Teaching “Revolution” Tested

  Open Access•Marcella Rollmann•Foreign Language Annals•1994

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