Foreign Language Teaching

Language teaching approaches, methods and procedures are constantly undergoing reassessment. New ideas keep emerging as the growing complexity of the means of communication and the opportunities created by technology put language skills to new uses. In addition, the political, social and economic impact of globalization, the new demands of the labour market that result from it, the pursuit of competitiveness, the challenges of intercultural communication and the diversification of culture are all phenomena that have opened new perspectives on the central role that foreign languages have come to play in the development of contemporary societies.

This has far-reaching consequences in terms of foreign language learning. Having become more aware

These topics correspond to those key areas in language teaching permanently subject to detailed scrutiny by researchers in the field, and are all closely intertwined. Innovation cannot be detached from a specific methodological orientation and can only be validated if the evaluation tools are applied in a consistent way. On the other hand, methods and approaches that fail to prompt innovative practices within their didactic framework and do not promote the teacher’s creativity in the classroom and their ability to provide a creative learning environment are unable to keep up with the social, cultural and technological changes directly affecting the learners’ lives. In turn, teacher training plays a pivotal role in fostering a critical awareness of the potential, opportunities and challenges that all these aspects present to the

Since the approaches discussed in the first part rely heavily on social interacting and social representations, a reflection is required on the ways in which values are negotiated and agreed upon. The discussion of sensitive matters such as gender discrimination in teacher training is a first step towards ensuring a healthy social environment within the learning group. Even in the context of the language learning discourses are socially constructed, which is something that bears an influence not only on the oral and written production of learners, but also the very social dynamic of the class. The chapter that discusses this aspect, which can be broadly referred to as the politics of language teaching, is followed by another that examines teachers’ attitudes and needs towards innovation by means of the analysis of the results of a survey conducted both in Europe and the US on how teachers value the latest methods and approaches in language teaching and on the ways in which ICT has been used in the context of TBLT. This part of the book is rounded off by two studies targeting pre service teacher students and examining their prospects of professional development. One of them resorts to task-based learning and attempts to identify the concepts impacting teaching practices, while ascertaining how those concepts can be exploited in