Course designers need to consider the environment, needs, goals, format and assessment when planning a language curriculum. Language is more than labeling objects - it is linked to our perceptions and experience. The primary purpose of language is communication, so the focus should be on developing communicative competence rather than perfect grammar. Language is also systematic, with words, prefixes/suffixes organized according to the rules of morphology, semantics and syntax. Different regions have language variations in accents, vocabulary and sentence structure. When teaching language, educators should focus on communication and its systematic nature to motivate students rather than relying on repetition and correction.

1. What Educators Need to
Know About Language

2. Why talking this?
Course or curriculum designers need to know what they are going to plan.
Environment analysis
Needs analysis
Goals and Objectives
Format and Presentation
Monitoring and Assessment or Testing

3. What Is a Language?
Language is far more than a means for labeling objects and ideas in
the world around us.
We learn our language from the people around us as we learn the
world. Our language is an encoding system for the complex network
of meanings that make up our experience.
Whether you believe, as some theorists do, that language shapes the
way we perceive the world, or as others propose, that the world
shapes the language we use, it is inarguable that our perceptions of
reality and our language are inextricably linked.

4. Language Communicates
The primary purpose of language is communication. Therefore,
despite common misperceptions, mastery of a language does not
require near-native pronunciation or grammar.
What theorists call communicative competence is far more
important than a good accent or perfectly constructed sentences.
With a focus on communication, nativelike proficiency is not the goal
of language teaching, but rather a happy by-product of the basic
need that people have to communicate with each other.

5. Language Is Systematic
Language communicates with words—arbitrary symbols
systematically organized to convey meaning.
Languages also systematically order parts of words, such as prefixes,
suffixes, and roots, in a system called morphology.
The sounds and architecture of a language are relatively easy to
discern. Often less transparent is the system of mean-ings, or
semantics.
Semantics: syntax & pragmatics

6. Language Varieties
Different parts of the country have different accents, different words
for familiar objects, and structure of sentences.

7. Implications for Educators
Language communicates, and does so systematically. Without
analyzing the details of any language teaching methodology, a focus
on those two ideas may well alter how you look at language teaching
and learning.
Although we all ultimately want students to develop their new
language to the fullest possible extent, what we know about the
nature of language should lead us to think carefully about how we go
about meeting that goal.

8. Teachers, being teachers, are fond of correctness. As a result,
teachers rely all too often on repetition, memorization, and
especially correction when instead they should create situations that
motivate children to communicate.
Consider what constant correction does to communication: what
would the effect be? How long before you gave up trying to talk
altogether?

9. Finally, language is tied to deep identity. When you speak a language
you participate in its culture.
It needs to be understood that language replacement implies
cultural replacement as well.

10. Language Learning
Most language learning seems to be a function of the mind, a far
more elusive subject for research than the brain.
Psycholinguists’ data is limited to their subjects’ output, often
gathered in case studies of young children as they learn first and
subsequent languages.
Language acquisition (20th century)

11. Lessow-Hurley, Judith.2003. Meeting the needs of second language learners: An educator’s
guide. Chapter 2