Total commitment, total involvement, a total physical, intellectual, and emotional response are necessary to successfully send and receive messages in a second language. Few if any people achieve fluency in a foreign langauge sorely within the confines of the classroom. We probably have some questions about second languae acquisition.
1. What are learners' characteristics?
2. What are linguistic factors we have to teach?
3. What are the learning processes?
4. What is the relation between age and acquisition?
5. What are instructional variables?
6. What is context?
7. What is purpose of learning?
However, the quest for perfect methodology is already defeated games. The quest should be eclectic: no single theory or hypothesis will provide a magic formula for all learners in all contexts. And the quest is cautious: you will be urged to be as critical as you can in considering the merit of various models and theories and research findings. It should be "normal science" as a process of puzzle solving in which teachers are to discover the pieces and then to fit the pieces together.
Then what is language? The Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (2003, p. 699) states that "a systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures, or marks having understood meanings." Or we have Pinker's , (1994) definition such as
"Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child sponteneously, without conscious effort of formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently (p. 18)."
From those well-known definitions, this book summarized the definition of language as follows.
1. Language is systematic.
2. Language is a set of arbitrary symbols.
3. Those symbols are primarily vocal, but may also be visual.
4. The symbols have conventionalized meanings to which they refer.
5. Language is used for communication.
6. Language operates in a speech community or culture.
7. Language is essentially human, although possibly not limited to humans.
8. Language is acquired by all people in much the same way; langauge and language learning both have universal chanracteristics.
Teachers' understanding of the components of langauge determines to a larger extent how they teach a langauge. If, for example, you believe that nonverbal communication is a key to successful second language learning, you will perceive some attention in your curriuclum to nonverbal systems and cues. If you perceive language as a phenomenon that can be dismantaled into thoughsands of discrete peices and those pieces programmatically taught one by one, you will attend carefully to an understadngin of the discrete forms of langauge. If you think language is essentially cultural and interactive, your classroom methodology will be imbued with sociolinguistic strategies and communicative tasks.
This will guide teachers or teachers-to-be to a path to consider all the varities in a very comprehensive professionalism.