25- It might seem difficult enough to develop our students' linguistic competence, but these days much more

is demanded of a language teacher. Among other things, the teacher is supposed to be an intercultural mediator capable of introducing students to the differences in attitudes, beliefs, values, customs and behaviour between the native and the target cultures. In other words, especially within the state education system, language has more than instrumental value, and we need to make sure our students see the value "de la lengua extranjera como medio de comunicacin y entendimiento entre pueblos, facilitador del acceso a otras culturas, a otras lenguas y como enriquecimiento personal" as the Official Curriculum puts it. Much of the drive behind this aim comes from European policy-makers, who see language teaching and learning as essential to the formation of a cross-cultural European identity. You might want to think about how Spanish culture differs from British or American culture with respect to attitudes, values, beliefs and behaviour. You should also think about how we might focus on intercultural differences in the classroom, and how we might encourage our students to reflect critically on these differences. I have uploaded an extract from a text by Michael Byram, a key European theorist in this area, and a copy of the introduction to the curriculum for Bachillerato, in which we can see the importance attached to conciencia intercultural by the Spanish education authorities. 26- Discourse analysts study language in use - spoken or written language produced for a communicative purpose between two or more interlocutors in a real context. Any real use of language can be the object of discourse analysis - doctor-patient interviews, letters to the editor, religious sermons, text messages between teenagers. The discourse context influences and sometimes determines our intonation, vocabulary, and grammar and affects both the form and content of our messages. The basic idea is that language use is in principle addressee-oriented. In writing this text, for example, I have in mind non-native speaker students of English who have attended the class devoted to this topic. As teachers we need to encourage students to do more than produce and understand the literal meaning of English sentences. You can be brilliant at producing correrct sentences and still write a terrible application for a job. 27- The concept of communicative competence has had a profound impact on ideas about language teaching over the last thirty years. Originating in sociolinguistics, it is now taken for granted that the langauge teacher is concerned not only to develop the learners linguistic competence but also other competences. The interest in these has developed in parallel with the emergence of sociolinguistics, pragmatics and other disciplines, apart from the ideea of strategic competence - which enables us to use various strategies to keep an interaction going. The result is that the communicative classroom looks very different from the traditional classroom - in addition to teaching vocabulary and sentence-level grammatical forms, we now teach students how to use language - how to speak appropriately as well as correctly, how to construct whole texts, how to participate in conversations, etc. 28- Two main theoretical developments have influenced language teaching in the last thirty years - the idea of language as communication and the hypothesis that the learning of a second or foreign language is similar to the acquisition of the mother tongue. Research into first language acquisition developed from Chomsky's mentalistic grammar and the concept of creative construction. Language acquistion is based not on imitation but on the construction, through exposure to the language, of a mental representation of the syntax of that language. This process is essentially internally driven - it takes place unconsciously, without formal instruction, through participating in interactions with parents and siblings. There appears to be a more or less universal sequence in which the grammar of the language is acquired. 29 and 30- A question of fundamental importance is whether first and second language acquisition are similar or not. If the most efficient way of acquiring a second language resembles the way we acquired

our first, the classroom should attempt to replicate, as far as possible, the natural processes of language acquisition. However, it is not obvious that in most cases this will be possible. Naturalistic L2 acquisition by children, it is true, is very similar to first language acquisition, but L2 foreign language learning in a classroom for a couple of hours a week is not. The most prominent proponent of the similiarity between first and second language acquisition is Stephen Krashen. For Krashen, the teacher's main task was to provide the learners with comprehensible input, which would provide the means for them to construct their representation of the grammar of the foreign language. In Krashen's Natural Approach, the focus is on comprehension activities, while formal focus on language is avoided. Unconscious acquisition hs priority over formal learning, This was an attractive and influential idea, but was predictably found to over-simplify the process of acquiring a second, and in particular, a foreign language. Krashen, however, is worth reading and you 31- Among the key concepts in SLA theory is that of interlanguage. Language learners form a complex mental representation of the syntax of the target language based on rules derived both from their first language and from the target language. Learners appear to move through a more or less universal developmental sequence and display characteristic errors at each stage. Some of these are interlingual derived from the L1 - and some are intralingual - based on the target language. Errors are inevitable in normal language learning, are a sign of the learner's developing interlanguage, and are valuable for the teacher, as they allow her to identify the stage of language acquisition that the learner has reached. 32- The dominant orthodoxy in current SLA studies is termed focus on form. Proponents of this idea, most notably Michael Long, believe, like Krashen, that first and second language acqusition are similar. However, the experience of learners in immersion programmes demonstrated that some kind of formal focus on language is essential in second language acquisition. However, this cannot consist of formal lessons devoted to language, as the human brain is not equipped (so they claim) to acquire language in this way. What they propose is a programme based on communicative tasks and activities, with a lot of aural and written input, supplemented by a focus on small items of language where absolutely necessary - most importantly when communication in the classroom breaks down. For example, if students have to follow instructions in order to draw a picture of a room, they might have a problem with the prepositions in and on, and the teacher might give a short explanation of the difference between them, after thea ctivity has taken place. There is an alternative idea, which I find attractive for foreign language learning situations. This is called focus on forms and sees language learning as skill learning, which involves an initial presentation by the teacher, controlled practice and feedback and then an attempt to use the new language in a communicative task. Note that both approaches see communicative activities as central to the learning processes. The focus on forms approach, however, is more inclusive, as it not against incidental focus on form, but wants to supplement it with a more structured approach to the presentation of new material. What few theorists would defend today is the kind of classroom in which learners progress through a series of grammar lessons with little attempt to give them opportunities to use the new language in communication.