English, language learning and education

For teachers, the teaching of young adolescents poses some of the greatest and most rewarding challenges. English language teaching with secondary aged students pursues the aims:
 

• to develop the students' abilities to use and understand English.
• to broaden the students' understanding und knowledge of the English speaking societies and, through them, learn about their own society (cross-cultural knowledge).
• to involve the students and to develop their abilities to manage their own learning.
• to support teachers in developing their own teaching and understanding of language learning.

In many classrooms the initial experience of learning English is one of tremendous energy and imagination, in which students feel a whole new world is opening up for them as they learn to express themselves in another language. It is, however, also a sad fact that for other students it is sometimes a time of failure and disappointment in which they gradually feel left behind, often resorting to misbehaviour in the classroom and a gradual rejection of the work that the teacher is doing for them. It is thus important for everybody in teaching students to try to determine the route to success. In the following pages the basis for success in teaching and learning English is focused on.