Language education involves teaching and learning languages, including improving skills in one's native language, but mainly focuses on learning foreign or second languages. It is a branch of applied linguistics. There are three main methods for teaching foreign languages: the structural view which treats language as a system to code meaning, the functional view which sees language as a way to express functions like requests, and the interactive view which views language as a way to create social relationships through conversational exchanges, with the interactive view being dominant since the 1980s.