The Significance of Foreign Languages and Linguistic Diversity
Topic: Relevance of the knowledge of foreign languages as an instrument among people and countries, and interest in linguistic diversity by getting to know a foreign language and its culture.
1. Introduction
2. Language Families
3. Relevance of Knowledge of Foreign Languages
a) Language as a barrier
b) Reasons to learn a foreign language
c) Relevance of learning English language
4. Interest in Linguistic Diversity
a) Current law and English as a Foreign Language according to the current curriculum
b) Teaching strategies to work on cultural awareness competence
c) Other strategies to learn about a foreign language
5. Conclusion
6. Bibliography
- Introduction
As many people might think, language and communication are crucial in order to create a link among people from different countries and cultures. Nowadays, due to the expanding world we live in and the globalization taking place, the need for establishing a common language to communicate is an existing requirement.
In this way, over the past years, languages such as Esperanto tried to fulfill the mentioned needs in order to create a link among society. Nevertheless, this attempt failed, but it led to the creation of a new language known as Lingua Franca that made it possible to communicate between different citizens of the world.
Despite this outcome, it is crucial to bear in mind that languages can also act as a barrier when people don’t achieve a specific control or level of the target language.
For that reason, educational law gives great importance to the teaching and learning process of a Foreign Language, in this case, English language, mentioned in Organic Law (LOE) 2/2006 of May 3rd, modified by LOMLOE 3/2020 of December 29th. It is also included in RD 157/2022 of March 1st and more specifically in D61/2022 of July 13th, where areas like plurilingualism focus on this main purpose mentioned previously.
Throughout this topic, I will briefly talk about why English language has been chosen as the main language to work on in the educational system, as well as its main reasons. Secondly, I will move on to some cultural reasons and the existing interest that we should make our students engage with. Finally, I will make a brief conclusion as well as provide a bibliography where I will mention the main authors I have focused on to write the following topic.
2. Language Families
To talk about language and its relevance, it is crucial to first understand the great variety of languages that exist in the world. As it might be known, the existence of different languages is due to the belonging to language families. In this way, we can talk about families like the African, Indo-European… The last one mentioned embraces languages like Latin, which leads to the development of other languages like Spanish.
Additionally, experts like Saussure make a distinction of the three aspects that a language can have, including speech, language, and langue. Regarding speech, he states that it is an individual action where every person settles his own characteristics, as it can vary depending on prosodic signs like rhythm, intonation… Nevertheless, everyone, according to the social rules that exist, follows the same or very similar pattern to communicate, where the same language is being spoken when following grammar and discourse rules. Despite this fact, and as has been mentioned previously, languages can also act as a barrier, which will be explained in the following paragraph.