Jenő Bárdos: The Formation and Development of Language Pedagogy

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate a growing awareness in thinking about language pedagogy as an interdisciplinary applied science that can provide a framework to create an integrative theory and methodology of language learning and acquisition. The art of teaching a foreign language is often squeezed into a subject-centred, old-fashioned methodology (a method-centred branch of applied didactics) or simply defined as a part of applied linguistics. Ever since the 1960s language pedagogy has grown to become a broad-ranging interdisciplinary science in the crossfire of several applied sciences like psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, educational psychology, psychometry, etc. Language pedagogy can be portrayed as a discipline embracing fairly distant applications of the so-called supportive and critical sciences (like linguistics, psychology and education), while having major fields of experience and knowledge of its own. Language pedagogy will include the philosophy of teaching foreign languages as documented in the past twenty-five centuries; the theory and practice of selecting, grading, and communicating language content in the language learning process; the development of simple and complex language skills: comprehension (listening and reading), communication (speech and writing) and mediation (translation and interpretation); error correction and feedback; language testing and examination techniques. Curriculum design and evaluation, the interpretation and evaluation of teaching materials, materials design and pedagogical technology will provide the content and forms of classroom solutions. The primacy of education in language pedagogy has not yet been adequately elaborated. Both didactics and education are related to language pedagogy, like generic phenomena to specific ones. Cross-cultural effects triggered by studying a foreign language and its culture have not yet been properly investigated in Hungary.

MAGYAR PEDAGÓGIA 97. Number 1. 3-17. (1997)

Levelezési cím / Address for correspondence: Bárdos Jenő, Veszprémi Egyetem Angol Nyelv és Irodalom Tanszék, H – 8201 Veszprém, Egyetem u. 3. e-mail:bardos@almos.vein.hu

 
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