Questões

Read the following extract to answer question.

    A friend of mine who is an orchestral conductor was asking me (early in our acquaintance) about what I did for a living. When I told him that apart from other activities, I wrote books about how to teach English he said ‘Books in the plural? Surely once you’ve written one, there’s nothing more to say!’ I wanted to reply that he had just argued himself out of a job (I mean, how many performances of Beethoven symphonies have there been in the twenty-first century alone?), but someone else laughed at his question, another musician made a different comment, the conversation moved on, and so Martin-the-conductor’s flippant enquiry evaporated in the convivial atmosphere of a British pub.

    But his question was a good one. Surely we know how to teach languages? After all, people have been doing it successfully for two thousand years or more, and some aspects of teaching in the past have probably not changed that much. But other things have, and continue to change. Which is (I suppose) why every time I re-examine past assumptions about teaching, I find myself questioning and reinterpreting things I thought were fixed. And of course, I am not alone in this. We all do it all the time – or at least we do if we haven’t closed our minds off from the possibility of change and renewal.

   Language teaching, perhaps more than many other activities, reflects the times it takes place in. Language is about communication, after all, and perhaps that is why philosophies and techniques for learning languages seem to develop and change in tune with the societies which give rise to them. Teaching and learning are very human activities; they are social just as much as they are (in our case) linguistic.

    But it’s not just society that changes and evolves. The last decades have seen what feels like unprecedented technological change. The Internet has seen to that, and other educational technology has not lagged behind. And it’s exciting stuff. I’ve tried to reflect that excitement and newness in parts of this new edition.

(Jeremy Harmer, How to teach English. Adaptado)