Wim Gombert

CHAPTER 8. Summary, discussion and conclusion 135 CONCLUSION If we think about communication as an essential tool for the council of Europe to facilitate interaction, mobility and mutual understanding between European citizens (Puppinck, 2012), the primary concern of foreign language teaching in the European Union should be the e ective development of oral skills as the nature of these skills (for the time being) prevents the use of machine tools. According to Richards and Rodgers (2014, p. 105), the communicative approach to language teaching must be considered as a paradigm shi for which the world was ready at that time. It was an important methodological innovation worldwide, but speci cally in Europe, as it provided the tools for the goals set by the council for a growing European community. However, when looking at current structure-based L2 teaching practice in the Netherlands, this communicative approach needs an essential change for oral skills to play the important role assigned to them by the Council of Europe, especially when considering L2’s like French and German for which not much out-of-class exposure is available. Indeed, they lack the enormous amount of extramural exposure that L2 English has in the Netherlands. A DUB approach to foreign language teaching may be considered to be a response to the Council’s invitation to support this essential tool for communication in many languages in the European Union. PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS is study has con rmed that a strong version of CLT in which “using to learn” is the approach is to be preferred over a weak version of CLT in which “learning to use” is the approach in the development of all skills. As many applied linguists have proclaimed, L2 exposure and active use are of essence in learning an L2, and this view is now thoroughly supported by dynamic usage-based linguistic theory. We believe a DUB approach is likely to facilitate the process of foreign language learning because it is cognitively less demanding than an SB approach and with its emphasis on frequency of exposure of whole utterances in the target language, the (potential) degree of entrenchment is high. e current study speci cally compared a more traditional SB approach to one speci c DUB-inspired teaching method, AIM and AIMe, but DUB principles could easily be applied to other methods, for instance as exempli ed in CLIL and immersion programs. Moreover, Task Based Language programs would lend themselves perfectly, as long as the focus is not on morphological form only but form as Long (2000) intended it with emphasis on words, collocations, pragmatic patterns, and we will assume pronunciation, intonation. To develop a DUB inspired foreign language program the following should be kept in mind:

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