Eight Principles for Teaching and Learning Language

Eight Principles for Teaching and Learning Language

Willy A Renandya

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ABSTRACT

There are many factors that affect the success or failure of foreign language learning. Some of these factors have more to do with cognitive, affective and social dimensions of language learning, while others are related to curricular issues (e.g., curricular contents and how these are selected, organized and sequenced),  to teacher factors (e.g., their prior training and their mastery of the subject matter) or learner factors (e.g., their motivation, attitudes and strategies) and a whole host of situational factors (e.g., class size, availability of learning resources and support from the government and community). In this ebook, I focus on eight SLA-inspired factors (i.e., roles of input, ouput, fluency, formulaic expressions, motivation, grammar, vocabulary, amount and intensity of instruction) and formulated these as eight core  principles that can guide our language teaching and learning. I argue that when these principles are given sufficient attention by teachers, school administrators and other key stakeholders, there is more than a fair chance that we might be able to raise the proficiency level of our EFL students.