SECUNDARIA. ESPECIALIDAD INGLS. TEMA 1.

EVOLUCIN DE LA DIDCTICA DE LAS LENGUAS. TENDENCIAS DE LA

DIDCTICA DEL INGLS. LOS ENFOQUES COMUNICATIVOS.
INTRODUCTION.
The Spanish education system is currently regulated by the Organic Law 8/2013, of
December 9th, to improve the quality of education (LOMCE). The main objectives of the
reform are to reduce the rate of early abandonment of education, improving educational
outcomes in accordance with international standards, both on the comparative rate of
students and excellent students, and graduates of Secondary Education, improve
employability, entrepreneurship and stimulate students. The principles on which the
reform pivots are basically increasing the autonomy of schools, strengthening the
management capacity of the management of the centers, external evaluations to stage
the rationalization of educational provision and flexible paths. Along with these principles
it is necessary to highlight three areas in which the LOMCE makes special emphasis in
view of the transformation of the education system: the information and communications
technology, promotion of multilingualism and the modernization of the Spanish Vocational
Training. The education system must be flexible enough to collect training needs in a
changing society, hence the importance of developing an educational project and a
teaching program that meets the needs and peculiarities in student learning.
In this topic I will deal with the different methodological trends we may find in the teaching
of languages, especially in the teaching of English as a foreign language and mainly the
communicative approach. This kind of topic is of special interest for teachers due to the
implications and applications that it may have in our teaching life. It may help us choose
the appropriate text-book or programme syllabuses but it may also provide us with
motivation to be transferred to our students. Whatever our methodology might be, we
shall learn from this topic that it should be above all, eclectic. In other words, we shall
learn that there is not one methodology that is perfect but that all of them have something
to offer.
I will first mention the main trends in the methodology and their evolution, then I will
review those which were developed in the twentieth century and finally, I will focus on the
ones we find nowadays, especially those used in the Spanish educational system.

1. THE EVOLUTION OF DIDACTICS IN LANGUAGE.

Language is a purely human activity; in fact, it is one of the main features that distinguish
man from the rest of the creatures. An act of verbal communication is only possible
between human beings who transfer their ideas from the mind of the speaker to the mind
of the listener.
More than three thousand languages are spoken in the world nowadays. The problem
arises when we realise that we dont know how a language is acquired. First, language is
learned, that is, every normal child can learn any natural language as a first language,
under the appropriate conditions. Secondly, no theory can explain this fact. That is, we
have no model which can show how language is learned under the appropriate
circumstances. Summarising the whole idea we could say that the psychological field is
gaining an important place in the learning of a second language. But perhaps the best
advice on methodology must come from experienced teachers rather than from
theoreticians.
1.1.

CLASSICAL TEACHING METHODS (UNTIL 18TH CENTURY).

Languages have always been studied even in the most ancient civilizations. The first
written document that exits is the order given by Sargon of Arcadia to proclaim his great
deeds in all the different tongues of the Empire in the year 2850 BC. We know of
interpreters and translators in Egypt or in Babylonia who were of the greatest importance
when arriving at commercial pacts among the different peoples of Cyprus, Palestine, etc,
in fact, there are more than 350 documents that prove the existence of a Bureau for
foreign affairs in the kingdom of Amenophis III.
It is not surprising to learn that there was not much interest in languages among the wise
Greeks because, what was the point in learning languages if there was nothing worth
reading abroad? Much later, on the other hand, the wealthy Romans could learn the
Greek language so as to be able to read Plato and Aristotle thanks to their Greek teacherslaves. But we can only guess that their learning was mainly based upon the grammartranslation method together with some conversation, a successful method that
transformed Rome into an almost bilingual civilisation.
Another step in the teaching of languages must be found in the first Christian
missionaries who were forced to learn the different languages for the people they were
trying to convert. During the Middle Ages the only language considered worth studying
were Latin, Greek and Hebrew which were learned in the Monasteries.

But, perhaps, the greatest milestone in the learning of languages regarding the modern
western world was the discovery of America. It was in America that the direct-method was
widely used for the first time. Columbus wrote in his diary that he was going to take six
Indians to Spain to teach them the language, and, what is more, that the Indians were
going to learn separately, totally deprived of their mother tongue.
Some conquerors also decided to follow the method and introduced themselves into the
different Indian tribes to the point of becoming almost natives like Francisco Del Puerto.
Even in the Renaissance we learn that one of the requirements to enter Harvard
University in 1636 was to possess a sound understanding of the Latin Classics.
But it was not until the eighteenth century that the study of modern languages was
officially introduced. It was in the University of Harvard, in the College of William and Mary
that in 1779 the teaching of French substituted the teaching of Hebrew.
1.2.

FIRST APPROACHES (19TH CENTURY).

Learning languages is an intuitive process for which human beings have a natural
capacity that can be awakened provided that the proper conditions exist, that is, someone
to talk to, something to talk about and motivation or desire to learn. Learning, therefore, is
not a mere rational process that must follow a strict syllabus.
The above idea could be said to be a summary of the philosophy that has always
remained constant for all the different methods in teaching. However, in the very
beginning, foreign languages were taught in much the same way as classical ones.

Grammar-Translation Method.

This method was used up to recent times. It consisted in the rigid presentation of
grammar. The grammars of Latin and Greek and their terminology were applied to the
teaching of modern languages. Students had to master Latin grammar and what is worst,
the vocabulary they were exposed to was predominantly literary, and you could find
passages by Cervantes, Molire or Shakespeare even in elementary texts. Such
methodology did not include conversation because its purpose was to assimilate the
prescriptive grammars and then proceed to read literature.
The students were lost very often because they were not able to see why English had a
nominative or dative case until they learnt Latin, and what is worse, English grammar
could be adjusted to Latin grammar all the time. One very good example of this is the
sentence it is I, because in Latin the complement must agree in genre, number and case
with its subject. However, in English, the correct construction, as we all know, is normally

taken to be it is me.
We have to say, however, that fashionable as it is today to criticize every method of the
past and although no conversation was usually acquired, the student did acquire a
thorough knowledge of grammar structure, syntax, etc. and this could be transformed into
conversational knowledge fairly easily when needed, as has in fact happened in many
cases.

Direct or Natural Method.

In Europe, and more precisely in Germany, Vietor in 1882 made an attack on the
grammar-translation method and claimed that students should be given the chance to
discover the rules by themselves through experience in that language. The language
should be learned form speech rather than from written texts.
In Europe one of the best known representatives of language teachers was Gougin who
in 1880 attempted to build a methodology around the observation of child language
learning. He developed this technique after a long struggle trying to learn to speak and
understand German through formal grammar-based methods. However, their total failure
and his turning to observations of how children learn a second language is one of the
most impressive personal testimonials in the recorded annals of language learning.
In 1890 and during a conference of modern language teaching a resolution was passed
to make Phonetics the basis of language teaching.
It must be said that the Direct Method was more an approach to language teaching than a
proper method of teaching. As has already been hinted, its main principles were rejecting
the grammar-translation method and opposing translation into the language being
studied. Websters International Dictionary defines it as A method of teaching a foreign
language, through conversation, discussion, and reading in the language itself without
use of the pupils language, without translation, and without the study of formal grammar.
The first words are taught by pointing at objects or pictures or by performing actions.
We could summarize by saying that the Direct Method consisted of the following ideas:
language should be taught through speech, language should be learnt using the
language rather than memorising, and the mother tongue was not used.
But, among other things, we could say that when such a method was adapted to schools,
programmes, materials and textbooks several problems arouse. It required able teachers
and great efforts; besides, the use of active methods led to indiscipline in class,
translation was obliterated forgetting that it could also be useful at times, and the learning
of grammar and vocabulary was too slow.

1.3.

TWENTIETH CENTURY INNOVATIONS.

First, we should note that there was an attempt to present grammar as a natural
sequence instead of in a schematic way. Besides, more current texts were handed for
translation and, what is more important, conversation was finally introduced in teaching.
But we can criticise some disadvantages. Mainly, teachers who had never experimented
the real language passed their own errors on to their students due to their deficient
knowledge of the language they were teaching; and also that from the beginning of the
twentieth century until World War I there was a common lack of interest in foreign affairs
leading to the fact that only the wealthy and cultivated classes were interested in learning
languages so as to be able to read foreign literature.

The Berlitz School.

Private institutions and academies began to recognise that the student could be more
interested in learning to speak the language than to read it. One of these schools was
Berlitz. It was founded in 1878 by Maximiliam Berlitz in Rhode Island. It was immensely
successful to the point that it had two hundred schools all over the world by 1914.
Summing up, the Berlitz method consisted in young native teachers, no translations at all,
avoidance of grammar explanations and the technique of question-answer. The principle
they worked on was that the pupil did not see the text, but listened to it in such a way that
he could not possibly assign the letters of the second language the same value they had
in his mother tongue.

The contribution of anthropology, psychology and sociology.

When linguists turned from comparative historical philology to the description of modern
languages, a new emphasis was given to the teaching methods. The study of the
American and Australian aborigines and their tongues questioned the universality of the
classical grammars, but at the same time it discovered that all tongues had certain
features in common.
The study of American Indian languages presented difficulties because they had no
written forms to base their studies on. The grammarians had to listen and reconstruct the
grammar from the spoken language. This made a significant contribution to future
language teaching methodologies.
However, too much attention was paid to the spoken language and very little to the written
aspect. But what is obvious is that the intransigence of these scientists on behalf of the
spoken, popular tongue and its importance, as against the written literary version, served

as an effective counterpoise to the excess of the traditional purists.

Basic English.

The following discoveries made the appearance of the Basic English method possible:
every language has a basic grammar that should be taught first and a basic vocabulary
too, consisting of the most frequent words, around 850 words.
The methodology intended to teach both this basic grammar and basic vocabulary. The
verbs were mainly phrasal, such as get in instead of enter; and the nouns paraphrases,
such as small tree instead of bush; while adjectives were very limited, such as nice for
the concepts pretty, wonderful, fantastic, etc.
Basic English eliminates all but eighteen verbs, such as get, put and their combinations
with operational words like at and on. It eliminates concrete nouns and just keeps some
four hundred general nouns such as love and hate, and two hundred pictureable
objects like lemon and apple and one hundred adjectives.
The first thing we can criticise is that if we add the extra set of words allowed for scientist,
economists, etc, (jargons) well have more than 8.000 words. Besides, for a Romance
speaker to learn enter would be easier than to learn get in. Basic English is also
restrictive and negative, and what is worse, it is not a real kind of English because it
involves learning leaving many concepts behind. It is an artificial language which can only
serve for very specific communicative purposes and that is not the way real languages
function.

Structuralism.

The two main figures, Sapir and Bloomfield, gave birth to the so called Structuralism.
Sapir combined linguistics and anthropology and made teachers aware of the need to
transmit not only a language but also its cultural background stressing the social aspect of
language and the relationships between race, culture and language.
Bloomfield for his part contributed more to the spreading of American structuralism. He
endeavoured to make linguistics as scientific as possible and envisaged language as a
series of stimuli and responses, a series of habits. The concept lying behind Bloomfields
ideas is the embryo of the programmed learning of foreign languages.
The A.S.T.P. or Army Specialized Training Program was tremendously successful during
World War II. Conventional teaching methods were too slow and in 1941, forced by the
need to learn languages in the background of the World War, a linguistic programme was
developed. It was called A.S.T.P. and it achieved miraculous results.

Basically, it was a combination of the Berlitz technique together with some mechanical
aids and phonographic recordings and, finally, some features borrowed from the new
methodology developed in the study of Indian languages. It was an intensive method, 8 to
12 hours a day, there were just 10 to 12 pupils per class on average, there were native
speakers to provide real conversation, there was a strong grammatical instruction, there
was visual and audio aid too and, what was more important, the students were young and
intelligent and had a very strong motivation.
This success in the teaching of soldiers was a failure when the same methodology was
applied to children. The main reason was that these pupils did not receive so many hours
of class, just 3 hours a week, and what is more important, they lacked the soldiers strong
motivation. But, what is clear is that we owe to the A.S.T.P. the fact that conversational
fluency became one of the main goals in language teaching.
For the structuralist grammars, language is a series of unique structures whose
construction follows regular patterns which are the basis of grammar. They compared the
structures of language 1 and 2, and saw which structures were similar and which could
cause interference in the learners of a second language. Pattern practice was an
essential feature of structuralist methods too and its aim was to provide the pupil with
practice in certain structures or patterns.
Chomsky was one of the first theoreticians to note the deficiencies of this type of
grammars. In his opinion, the structuralists only deal with surface structure of language
leaving the underlying structure behind and, thus, forgetting such an important aspect as
ambiguity or intuition. And, what is more, the kind of exercises proposed by structuralism
is purely mechanical and has no connections with actual situations, with the result that
students often lacked meaningful practice. Another important criticism is that structural
methods offered teachers the material they considered that should be taught but did not
show them how to teach it.

Silent Way Method.

Caleb Gattegno founded "The Silent Way" as a method for language learning in the early
70s. Some of his basic theories were that "teaching should be subordinated to learning"
and "the teacher works with the student; the student works on the language". The most
prominent characteristic of the method was that the teacher typically stayed "silent" most
of the time, as part of his/her role as facilitator and stimulator, and thus the method's
popular name. Language learning is usually seen as a problem solving activity to be
engaged in by the students both independently and as a group, and the teacher needs to

stay "out of the way" in the process as much as possible.

The Silent Way is also well-known for its common use of small coloured rods of varying
length (Cuisine rods) and colour-coded word charts depicting pronunciation values,
vocabulary and grammatical paradigms. It is a unique method and the first of its kind to
really concentrate on cognitive principles in language learning.

Community Language.

The founder figure was Charles Curran, an American Jesuit priest, whose work in
Counselling Learning (an approach to learning in general, based on Carl Rogers
counselling ideas and practices) was then applied to language learning. It seeks to
encourage teachers to see their students as "whole persons", where their feelings,
intellect, interpersonal relationships, protective reactions, and desire to learn are
addressed and balanced.

Students typically sit in a circle, with the teacher (as

counsellor) outside the ring. When a student wants to say something, they first say it in
their native language, which the teacher then translates back to them using the target
language. The student then attempts to repeat the English used by the teacher, and then
a student can respond using the same process. This technique is used over a
considerable period of time, until students are able to apply words in the new language
without translation, gradually moving from a situation of "dependence" on the teachercounsellor to a state of independence.

Suggestopedia.

In the late 70s, a Bulgarian psychologist by the name of Georgi Lozanov introduced the
contention that students naturally set up psychological barriers to learning - based on
fears that they will be unable to perform and are limited in terms of their ability to
learn. Lozanov began to develop a language learning method that focused on
"desuggestion" of the limitations learners think they have, and providing the sort of
relaxed state of mind that would facilitate the retention of material to its maximum
potential. This method became known as "Suggestopedia" - the name reflecting the
application of the power of "suggestion" to the field of pedagogy.
One of the most unique characteristics of the method was the use of soft Baroque music
during the learning process. Lozanov believed it created a level of relaxed concentration
that facilitated the intake and retention of huge quantities of material. Another aspect that
differed from other methods was the use of soft comfortable chairs and dim lighting in the
classroom (other factors believed to create a more relaxed state of mind). Other

characteristics of Suggestopedia were the giving over of complete control and authority to
the teacher and the encouragement of learners to act as "childishly" as possible .

Total Physical Response.

In the 1960s, James Asher began experimenting with a method he called Total Physical
Response. The method was to become well known in the 70s. It owes a lot to some basic
principles of language acquisition in young learners, most notably that the process
involves a substantial amount of listening and comprehension in combination with various
"physical responses" (smiling, reaching, grabbing, looking, etc) - well before learners
begin to use the language orally. It also focused on the ideas that learning should be as
fun and stress-free as possible, and that it should be dynamic through the use of
accompanying physical activity.
TPR is now a household name among teachers of foreign languages. It is widely
acclaimed as a highly effective method at beginning levels, and a standard requirement in
the instruction of young learners. It is also admired as a method due to its inherent
simplicity, making it accessible to a wide range of teachers and learning environments.

Natural Approach.

Stephen Krashen and Tracy Terrell developed the "Natural Approach" in the early
eighties, based on Krashen's theories about second language acquisition. The approach
shared a lot in common with Asher's Total Physical Response method in terms of
advocating the need for a "silent phase", waiting for spoken production to "emerge" of its
own accord, and emphasizing the need to make learners as relaxed as possible during
the learning process. Some important underlying principles are that there should be a
great deal of language "acquisition" as opposed to language "processing", and there
needs to be a considerable amount of "comprehensible input" from the teacher. Meaning
is considered as the essence of language and vocabulary (not grammar) is the heart of
language. As part of the Natural Approach, students listen to the teacher using the target
language communicatively from the very beginning. In early stages, students are not
corrected during oral production, as the teacher is focusing on meaning rather than form.
Communicative activities prevail throughout a language course employing the Natural
Approach, focusing on a wide range of activities including games, role-plays, dialogs,
group work and discussions. There are three generic stages identified in the approach:
(1) Preproduction - developing listening skills; (2) Early Production - students struggle

with the language and make many errors which are corrected based on content and not
structure; (3) Extending Production - promoting fluency through a variety of more
challenging activities.
2. TRENDS IN ENGLISH DIDACTICS.
Taking into account that this topic is based on methodology, it would be interesting to refer
to the Decree 43/2015, of 10th June, which regulates the organization and curriculum of
Compulsory Secondary Education in the Principality of Asturias that dedicated its Article 3
to Pedagogical Principles and that says that: the schools develop their teaching proposals
for this stage on the basis of attention to diversity and access for all pupils to regular
education. They also arbitrate methods that take into account the different rates of
learning, foster their ability to learn and promote teamwork. The teaching methodology in
this educational stage will be mainly active and participatory, encouraging individual and
cooperative work of students in the classroom. Teacher work team will make sure to
provide a multidisciplinary approach to the educational process, ensuring the coordination
of all faculty members to attend each student in their group. The correct oral and written
expression is encouraged. In order to encourage the habit and love of reading, time will
be devoted to it in teaching practice (not less than one hour per week in each subject),
which will be structured through the plan of reading, writing teaching and research center.
As I have already said, Chomsky was one of the first linguists to criticise the structuralist
method, but he also made strong attacks on traditional grammar. The only way out was to
develop his Transformational Generative Grammar.
2.1.

TRANSFORMATIONAL GENERATIVE GRAMMAR .

In 1957 and with the publication of Chomskys Syntactic Structures there was an
important shift in the study of languages due to the importance attached to the concept of
cognition in accounting for human language activity and this was later on developed until
it became what is known as so-called psycholinguistics.
Chomsky criticised the fact that structuralism did not describe the rules that allow
speakers to create an infinite number of utterances, in other words, their linguistic
competence. In his opinion, structuralists did not pay attention either to the deep structure
of language, forgetting thus that human language is a creative activity in which a speaker
is able to utter grammatically correct sentences without having ever heard them before.
However, Chomsky himself was conscious of the difficulty of applying his method to
actual language. Although he has asserted that he is not an expert on language teaching,

what is important for us teachers is the fact that he is mainly concerned with the structure
of language and with its creative nature especially. Besides, modern language teaching is
emphasizing the importance of the pupils creative handling of language. Therefore,
Chomsky was making indirect contributions to teaching.
There is value in offering ungrammatical examples apart from the correct ones; pupils
should be allowed to make errors; explanations in language learning are valuable; and
priority must be given to free expression and creativity.
2.2.

THE NOTION OF SITUATION.

Firth, appointed Professor of English in India, developed the concept of context of

situation: the meaning of an utterance is a function of the cultural and situational context
in which it occurs. Firth made special emphasis on the unity of language and social
activity. He developed three major categories in which language events can be described:
the verbal and non-verbal action of the participants in the event, relevant objects, and the
observable effect of the verbal actions. But perhaps Firths most important contribution
was the embryo of the registers of language, an idea that he developed towards the end
of his life when he began to identify some restricted languages or specialised varieties of
language related to professional interests or social roles. Halliday, one of Firths students,
devoted his career to the preservation of the unity of language and language use
regardless of the difficulty of the procedures to relate them. Both Firths and Hallidays
ideas led to the birth of sociolinguistics in the 70s.
2.3.

THE NOTION OF COGNITION.

The most significant work in the seventies did not concern teaching but learning. In fact,
most of the present-day trends in language study follow this line of work although it
begins to be threatened by the apparition of eclectic approaches that advice the use of a
good dictionary together with a special emphasis on conversation.
A new emphasis on communication has come out to the stage too encouraged by the
needs of thousands of students who travel to England for a month and want to get as
much as possible of their exposure to real English.
The concept cognition means given motivation, a normal human being would learn as
many languages as he is exposed to.
This is the practical application of psycholinguistic research on teaching languages.
Teachers must acquire an understanding of the learning process of their students rather

than attaching importance to the materials or methods that they should be applying.
The aim of a language course is, therefore, to promote communicative performances.
3. COMMUNICATIVE APPROACHES.
Regarding the teaching of a Foreign Language, one of the most significant elements of
the LOMCE is the acquisition of the Key Competences in general and the development of
Linguistic Communication in particular. This competence presupposes the use of
language as a means of oral and written communication and as a learning tool and for
self-regulation of thinking, emotions and behaviour. It contributes in this way to the
development of a positive self-image, and helps forge a constructive relationship with
others and with the environment. So learning to communicate a way of establishing links
with others, and approaching and making sense of other cultures. Linguistic competence
is fundamental in the resolution of conflicts and in learning to co-exist peacefully.
We mention in this topic this competence because the curriculum in the Principality of
Asturias fosters learning based on competences, through the recommendations of the
teaching methods established for each of the subjects and their evaluation with
complementing criteria for each of the courses in accordance with the provisions of the
Order

ECD/65/2015

of

21st

January,

establishing

the

relationships

among

competences, contents and evaluation criteria of Primary Education, Compulsory

Secondary Education and Baccalaureate.
The acquisition of this competence involves a command of oral and written language in a
variety of contexts, and a functional use of at least one foreign language.
We as teachers must pay special attention to the importance of teaching communication
because it is the main goal when we study a foreign language. By teaching our students
how important is to get that purpose, then they would understand much better all the
activities concerned with communication in the classroom because many times, students
are sceptical to do many activities if they do not really know what is the final objective of
that exercise.
Communicative Language Teaching has its origins in two sources. First, the changes in
the British and American linguistics theory in the mid-late sixties and secondly, changes in
the educational realities in Europe. Therefore teaching traditions until then, such as
Situational Language Teaching in Britain and Audiolingualism in the United States started
to be questioned by applied linguists who saw the need to focus in language teaching on
communicative proficiency rather than on mere mastery of structures.

Meanwhile, the role of the European Union and the Council of Europe had a significant
impact on the development of Communicative Language Teaching since there was an
increasing need to teach adults the major languages for a better educational cooperation.
In 1971 a system in which learning tasks are broken down into units was put on the
market by a British linguist, D. A. Wilkins. It attempts to demonstrate the systems of
meanings that a language learner needs to understand and express within two types:
notional categories (time, sequence, quantity or frequency) and categories of
communicative function (requests, offers or complaints). The rapid application of these
ideas by textbook writers and its acceptance by teaching specialists gave prominence to
what became the Communicative Approach or simply Communicative Language
Teaching.
Beginning in the mid-1960sm there has been a variety of theoretical challenges to the
audio-lingual method. Scholars such as Halliday, Hymes, Labov and Chomsky challenged
previous assumptions about the language structure and language learning, taking the
position that language is creative (not memorized by repetition and imitation) and rule
governed (not based on habits). For Hymes, the goal of language teaching is to develop a
communicative competence, that is, the knowledge and ability a learner needs to be
communicatively competent in a speech community. Halliday elaborated a functional
theory of the functions of language, and Canale and Swain identified four dimensions of
communicative competence: grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic
competence. Chomsky levelled some criticism at structural linguistic theory. He
demonstrated that the fundamental characteristics (creativity and uniqueness of individual
sentences) of language were not part of the structural theories of language.
3.1.

THRESHOLD LEVEL.

It was born in 1971 in a symposium and it attempted to create a syllabus for the common
core which all learners should posses before moving to their special areas of interest. The
Threshold Level was based on Jespersens notional categories: semantic-grammatical
categories: such as past, future, location, etc; categories of modality: such as possibility,
or necessity; and categories of communication: such as questions, requests, orders, etc.
The Threshold Level suggests the following language functions and topic areas. Its aim is
that students will be able to use the foreign language to fulfil the following general
functions: imparting and seeking factual information, expressing and finding out
intellectual attitudes, expressing and finding out emotional and moral attitudes, getting

things done, and socialising.

They should be able to function particularly in respect to the following topic areas:
personal information, house and home, life at home, education and future career, free
time, entertainment, travel, relations with other people, health and welfare, shopping, food
and drink, services, places, foreign language and weather.
The threshold Level suggests the following language activities:

Speaking: the learner will be able to fulfil the language functions specified above

and to deal with the topics listed before in the way described there. In doing so they will
be able to express the general and specific notions of the content specification of the
previous chapter and they will be able to use the exponents marked there.

Listening: the learners will be able to understand the most likely answers to

questions asked by themselves, the most likely responses to matters raised by

themselves or to answers given by themselves, questions asked by others and
information given by others within the mentioned topics, the texts of the commonest
announcements via public address systems in airports, at railway stations, etc, and
warnings such as stop, watch out, etc.

Writing: the learners will be able to write both formal and informal letters in

accordance to the situations.

Reading: they will be able to read letters and simple brochures sent in return for

formal letters written by the learners themselves, informal letters from friends and
relatives, and generally used texts on road signs and public notices.
Later, the threshold Level makes it clear that no objective could be complete unless we
include an indication as to the degree of skill that will be expected of the learner. In
whatever way we evaluate the learners ability the main criterion will have to be whether
communication takes place, and that communication takes place with some degree of
efficiency.
CONCLUSION.
The LOMCE states that the domain of a second or even a third foreign language has
become a priority in education as a result of globalization in which we live, while shown
as one of the main shortcomings of our educational system. The European Union sets the
promotion of multilingualism as an essential objective for the construction of a European
project. The law strongly supports multilingualism, redoubling efforts to get the students

are fluent in at least a first foreign language, whose level of listening and reading
comprehension and oral and written expression is crucial to promote employability and
career ambitions and therefore firmly committed to curricular incorporation of a second
foreign language.
The LOMCE in its Preamble states that mainly all developed countries are currently or
have been found in recent years, immersed in the process of transforming their education
systems.

Inherent

to

more

global,

open

and

interconnected

world

social

transformations, like this one in which we live, have been retrained different countries on
the need for policy changes in a larger and smaller grade to adapt their educational
systems to the new requirements.
It is very interesting to finish this topic showing what the Royal Decree 1105/2014 of 26th
December, where the core curriculum of Compulsory Secondary Education and
Baccalaureate is established in its second additional provision entitled Learning of
foreign languages: the educational authorities may provide that a part of the curriculum
subjects are taught in foreign languages without involving modification of the basic
aspects of the curriculum regulated by this Royal Decree. In this case, they shall ensure
that throughout the period the students acquire the terminology of the subjects in both
languages. The institutions that provide part of the curriculum subjects in foreign
languages shall, in any case, establish the criteria for the admission of students
established by the Organic Law. Such criteria shall not include linguistic requirements.
The Spanish language or the official language will only be used as support in the process
of learning a foreign language. Comprehension and oral expression are prioritized.
Easing measures and alternative methodologies in teaching and assessment of the
foreign language for students with disabilities will be established, especially for anyone
who has difficulties in speaking. These adaptations in any case will be considered to
lessen the qualifications obtained.
Finally, the learners will be able to survive in temporary contacts with foreign language
speakers in everyday situations, whether as visitors to the foreign country or with visitors
to their own country, and to establish and maintain social contacts. And for such purpose,
we should be able to find a good balance between the four skills to practice in class:
listening, reading, speaking and writing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
Legal framework:

 Organic Law 8/2013 to improve educational quality, of 9th December.

Royal Decree 1105/2014 of 26th December, where the core curriculum of
Compulsory Secondary Education and Baccalaureate is established.
Reference manuals:

ECKERSLEY: A Modern English Course for Foreign Students. 1958. Cambridge.

HOWATT: A History of English Language Teaching. 1984. Oxford University Press.

VAN EK: The Threshold Level for Modern Language Teaching in Schools. 1976.
Longman.

SWAN and WALTERS: The New Cambridge English Course. 1990. Cambridge.

Webpages:

www.educastur.es

www.macmillaneducation.com

www.wikipedia.org