Some Trends and Issues in Foreign Language Education

The barrage of new trends and new foci in language teaching and learning can create a sense of unease among language educators, pulling them in many directions, as linguistic, cultural, technical, and educational considerations compete for time and space in their conceptual frameworks. It is a feeling shared by all those who are engaged in second language acquisition (SLA). Indeed, the burgeoning of knowledge in this discipline has made the field “virtually impossible to ‘manage’ ” (Brown, 2000: ix), as the profession tries to integrate findings from testing, bilingual education, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and intercultural communication—just to name a few of the sub-disciplines that enrich SLA.