The Art of Teaching a Second Language

This book is primarily intended for language teachers, but it is also readily available for average language learners. In this book, it is argued that in contrast to the mechanistic perspective of many natural sciences, language and its acquisition must be perceived as an art. The science of language is about what language is, that is, its grammatical structure, the pronunciation system, and its semantic organization. The art of language, however, is about what language does, that is, its pragmatic function and how people use it to do things. The art of learning a second language is about the notion that learners are more than passive recipients of a phenomenon called learning a second language. Learners are engaged in a unique and dynamic learning experience, and they can actively participate in shaping and reshaping such experience. The learning feeds them and they also feed the language.