English - The Most Important Second Language

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1. English - the most important second language

Over 700 million people in the world speak English and it is the international language of diplomacy, business, science, technology, banking, computing, medicine, engineering, tourism, and Hollywood films. Furthermore two-thirds of German companies anticipate that applicants have thorough knowledge of English. Therefore teachers have to advance students' foreign language competences as early as possible to prepare them for the globalised world outside the classroom. This is a challenging mission and a lot of teachers fail to provide their students with enough language input so that students feel unsure if they are able to fulfil the companies' expectations after graduating school. So teachers have to find a way to teach the five language skills that are, writing, listening, reading, speaking, and mediating, in a meaningful way by involving students in interacting in the target language while their attention is mainly focused on meaning and negligibly on form.

2. Different approaches to syllabus design

General Information

The main problem for a foreign language teacher is how to present the elements of the target language like structures, words and notions, to their students. To help the teachers with their demanding task, different syllabi have been designed. Widdowson points out that a syllabus is "the specification of a teaching program or pedagogic agenda which defines a particular subject for a particular group of learners ... a syllabus specification, then, is concerned with both the selection and the ordering of what is to be taught"(1990,p.127).

The traditional and the holistic syllabus are the mostly used syllabi in the foreign language classroom and it is cr...

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... Ahead 8.

Schülerbuch. Cornelson

Bygate, Samuda (2008). Tasks in Second Language Learning

(Research and Practice in Applied Linguistics)

Ellis, R. (2005). Planning and Task Performance in a Second

Language. John Benjamins Publishing Company

Ellis, Basturkmen, Loewen, (2001). Preemptive Focus on Form in

the ESL Classroom. TESOL Quarterly

Fotos, Nassaji (2007). Form-focused Instruction and Teacher

Education Studies in honour of Rod Ellis. Oxford Press

Nunan, D. (2004). Task-Based Language Teaching. Cambridge

language teaching library

Widdowson, H. (1990). Aspects of Language Teaching. Oxford:

Oxford University Press

Wilkins, D (1979). Notional Syllabuses. Oxford: Oxford

University Press

Willis, Willis (2007). Doing Task-based Teaching. Oxford

University Press. Oxford Handbooks for Language Teachers

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