Language Teaching For The Millennium

Language Teaching for the millennium

This article deals with the future of language teaching and the role as language teachers we could be in this. And especially we must answerer these twoquestions:
• What will the future be like?
• What should we be doing now to prepare our students for the future?

What will the future be like?
The future won’t just suddenly happen; the nature of thefuture exists in our present. So we must be prepared and expecting everything from it. Some of the more significant changes are these:

• A fragmented society : a society divided into smaller‘communities’ which extend across national borders. The notion of a ‘culture’.
• Decline of national governments: Supranational governments and businesses will exercise greater influence.
• Rapid(dis)appearance of jobs: Technology will cause the disappearance of many types of jobs, but also the emergence of new ones.
• Spread of ‘the market: The force of the market will be evident in all spheresof life.
• Influence of electronic media: the influence of the media will increase, people will receive information and spend their leisure time.
• ‘Endlessly eclectic’ the elements from verydifferent areas of life will be combined. ‘Expect anything’ is the best advice.


What should we be doing now to prepare our students for the future?

Language teaching practices today:
• Languagelearner as consumer: Education is becoming a business.
• Fragmented, eclectic content: a ‘unit’ of materials may be composed of seemingly random content.
• Significance: we have to prefer theimportance of the syntax forms and the syllabus to the moral contents.
• Standardised lessons: The lessons and the courses’ books have become more globalized in order to ease the labour of standardize theknowledge.

A ‘futures curriculum’ in language teaching
Some characteristics of a futures curriculum
1 Coherence: The use of themes, topics, projects to bind lessons together and provide...