The Importance Of Foreign Language Learning

In a continuously increasing multilingual society and globalised world learning a foreign language constitutes a necessary and important goal for all children. Foreign language learning and specifically English is the means for communication, the necessary requirement to pursue a career and a prerequisite to get into most universities around the world. Most importantly, Reagan and Osborn (2002) support that learning a language is important and valuable “in and of itself as part of the human experience”. And they further argue:

For us, perhaps the most powerful argument for the need for students to study languages other than their own is that the point of education is to introduce and initiate the individual into our common, human social and

As typical language students progress in language, they are required to remember and manipulate more and more words and language structures. However, almost in every foreign language classroom there are learners who struggle to learn a language. In many cases these are usually children with learning disabilities (LD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD) who seem to fall behind and demonstrate an inability to catch up with classmates as they are weak in phonological working memory and both short-term and long-term language learning (Gathercole & Baddeley, 1993; as cited in Leons, Herbert & Gobbo, 2009) and find the process of foreign language learning difficult to cope with and finally giving up or get exempted from foreign language learning. This happens not only in students with documented learning disabilities and/or AD/HD but also with students without a diagnosis who could be described as low-achieving or at-risk (Leons et al., 2009). Nevertheless, as cited in Wight (2015), the policy of exemption is against the inclusive philosophy and Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA, 2004) according to which all students have the right to appropriate education that must also include the learning of a foreign language. Sparks and Ganscow (1991) argue that research which addresses learning disabilities in

SF is a type of feedback initially proposed in Ypsilandis (2002) and its aim is to assist the learner at an early stage offering him more clarifications or explanations on the initial learning material and thus further assist him in the comprehension of it and further facilitate vocabulary retention in short and long-term memory. In Ypsilandis (2014) major research attempts on corrective and supportive feedback are cited and the author further examines experimentally the effectiveness of various kinds of supportive feedback strategies in vocabulary retention in a preliminary repetitive study which included three small size/scale experiments conducted in 2004, 2005 and 2006. Ypsilandis (2014) findings indicated no statistically significant difference in vocabulary retention among the feedback strategies tested (except one) in typical adults. In Ypsilandis studies the variable typical/non-typical development was not taken into consideration because this variable was typically not considered in most language learning experiments Thus, this study aims at contributing to both second/foreign language learning and learning disabilities fields by extending the SF research to both typically developing children and children with learning