Content and language-integrated learning

Abstract

More and more people seem to have realized that mastering a foreign language is a long, laborious and painful process and that no foreign-language teaching method, whether old, i.e. “genuine”, involving the wearisome study of grammar, or modern, i.e. focusing on communication, can work wonders. The initial zeal for the study of a foreign language, which in Poland is most often English, evoked by another very expensive and thus “greatly promising” course-book, bound in a gleaming cover and illustrated with colourful pictures, very soon ebbs away and things are back to normal. A lot of money is invested: many expensive course-books, one more promising than the other, additional materials: apparently wonderful grammar books, dictionaries of synonyms, antonyms, phrasal verbs and collocations, computer inter-actional courses and what not, and yet the final outcome is, in many cases, the same: a recourse to body language and some basic phrases, i.e. the inability or greatly limited possibility to communicate in a language that is not the mother tongue.