Approaches, methods and techniques in second language teaching: From past to present

Abstract

Taking the ancestral human drive to learn other languages as a starting point, this article reviews the various trends that language teaching has gone through from classical times to our period. Special emphasis is given to the current concern for teaching and learning languages in order to communicate, a tendency systematized within the methodological framework known as the Communicative Approach to Language Teaching. To end with, the authors venture into some predictions about the future prospects of language teaching, an activity that, in their opinion, will be mediated by the multilingual needs and technological breakthroughs that our world is beginning to experience today.