ENG Departmental Seminar – Tackling the lack of expertise in language acquisition and misleading beliefs in second language teaching: Suggesting the way forward.

 

The nature of language, its representation in the mind-brain of humans, and how language is processed and acquired should constitute the backbone of all language and teacher-education programmes. The lack of language experts teaching in these programmes has often led to the perpetuation of misleading beliefs about language and language teaching. For example, the belief that language is a list of rules, such as those found in textbooks and that ‘knowing a language involves knowing its rules’. Perhaps one of the more critical sets of consequences of non-expertise in language and language acquisition involves a lack of understanding about how language develops over time. Some of the myths perpetuated include that teaching grammar explicitly and error correction is necessary or even beneficial, that first-language transfer is the source of all learning problems, and that adults learn languages differently from children, among many, many others. In this talk, the main consequences of the lack of experts and expertise in providing appropriate language teacher training will be discussed and several possible solutions highlighted.