Stern Language teaching objectives英文.pdfVIP

3 Language teaching objectives Explicit approaches to language teaching objectives In recent decades, the definition of language teaching objectives has played an increasingly major role in the development of second language curriculums. This development can be traced to the practical needs of government language training in wartime, but even more to the increas- ing influence of educational psychology and educational theory on language pedagogy. Practical language training requirements During World War II, preparation for overseas military operations had made crash programmes in foreign languages a necessity. Until then, language teaching had mainly taken place in academic contexts in which the objectives were broadly humanistic or educational and were not always too closely specified. Under the pressure of a large-scale war, language teaching had to be geared to quite specific purposes, such as the duties of military occupation, contact with civilian populations, gathering information from local inhabitants, interrogating prisoners of war, and analysing captured documents. Consequently, language train- ing in the armed forces was intensive and concentrated on the war needs. In the post-war era the lessons derived from this kind of purpose- specific language training were not forgotten. The principle of directing language training to definite ends was widely applied to language train- ing in government and industry. Even for peacetime language training programmes it was not good enough merely to state that an officer needed to know French, Arabic, or Hindi. Standards of language profi- ciency and specified skills in relation to the demands of professional tasks and positions had to be more accurately described. Such defini- tions were needed for at least three reasons: one was to be able to state precisely the language requirements for particular positions; a second was to have criteria to test applicants language command for these positions; and a third was