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Abstract(s)
It is of common sense to acknowledge the important role that languages play in all areas of life, from business and finance to education or cultural frameworks. It is of common sense that learning languages opens many doors, facilitating a myriad of educational and work prospects. In fact, speaking two or more languages proficiently or even in a rather holistic way is a vehicle for an endless world of possibilities not only in education but also in the most diverse political, social and cultural settings.
Nonetheless, language learning has not always been a door open to the world and it was only accessible to merchants, travellers, businessmen, intellectuals or to the ones who could afford an education, either at home or at educational institutions. The concept of formal education was non-existent until the eighteenth century when the Enlightenment movement raised important questions about education and the need to improve peoples’ mind through its power and via the creation of schools and universities (Feldges, 2022). However, the concept of popular education would only come to the fore of the political debate in the late nineteenth century. More schools were then built, schools for teachers also became forcefully needed as education was made available to an ever-growing proportion of the population. Teaching was thenceforth based on rote-learning and on rational and empirical approaches to life which reflected on the way learning was instilled into the students’ minds. Reading, writing, arithmetic, plus religious instruction, were part of the school curriculum, and teachers were merely instructors (Morgan, 2011). At university, classical languages such as Greek or Latin had a strong tradition, whereas modern foreign languages would only be adopted as a university discipline in the early twentieth century. However, only in the last three or four decades of the twentieth century would modern languages digress from their almost exclusive literary input and grammar focus and sociolinguistics started to realise the importance of the spoken and social aspects of language (Coleman, 2004), coinciding with the emergence of the communicative language learning approach in the 1970s. In secondary schools, modern foreign languages would only be widely integrated in the curriculum in the 1970s, because of a national curricular change in England, also in line with European developments in that field (Dobson, 2018).
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Keywords
Foreign languages Quality Digital resources Research Subject Categories::SOCIAL SCIENCES::Social sciences::Education
Citation
Silva, Elisabete Mendes (2023). Introduction. In Silva, Elisabete Mendes; Moraldo, Sandro; Zingaro, Anna; Gómez-Parra, María-Elena; Szabó, Ildikó; Chodzkienė, Loreta; Ghiviriga, Teodora (Orgs.). Implementation of digital language learning opportunities in Higher Education: guidelines for good practice. Bragança: Instituto Politécnico. p. 9-13. ISBN 978-989-33-4231-2
Publisher
Instituto Politécnico de Bragança