Socio -historical Factor in the development of FLE

Each country of the world has its own history that shapes the nations aims, aspirations, activities and destiny. This is often reflected through the educational system. Colonialism has been an important historical factor that can be said to have shaped the education system of many African countries and others in the world. For example, the Berlin conference in 1815 was dabbed the scramble for Africa. At this conference the European powers shared African states like a cake. This latter meant that; the colonies had to take up much of what was in their colonial masters homeland and to date features in education of these former colonial master are reflected in their former colonies.

The missionary factor also contributed a great deal in shaping the systems of education in most African countries. Christian missionaries in particular from Britain, France, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, and USA among others, have largely influenced the development of the education system in Africa. In this regard, the present systems of education in many countries of Africa, Asia, North and South America are actual products of past colonial influence. As such, most of these countries in their present endeavors in education represent in most cases, heroic efforts of their colonial heritage.

Another historical element is manifest between periods in history when attempts were made to try and bring together groups within close geographical boundaries, for example, East Africa, South Africa, West Africa and North Africa. A close look at these groups reflects features in their systems of education that tend to have similarities. While on the other hand, historically there have been struggles for the creation of national states, with each state wanting to have its own unique national identity. The national factors of these countries often show differences that are reflected in their education system. As such, similarities and differences of education systems all over the world have a history behind them.

3. Methodological Factors in the Modern Paradigm of foreign language education

In the context of foreign language classroom teaching, this study provides a specific overview of the self-regulated learning and language learning strategies as well as other relevant concepts and theories. The analysis focuses on guiding foreign language teachers in helping students to implement self-regulated learning strategies and motivations, adjust to their learning experience, and respond to the teaching process through the interest adjustment, then build self-regulated learning environment from a theoretical approach, expectations for enlightenment to the practices in foreign language teaching and learning. The construction of self-regulated learning environment based on foreign language classroom, represents a perspective for language teachers and learners, which is a new direction of foreign language education and has not been articulated hitherto.

For the purposes of this study, foreign language teaching can be characterized as any deliberate endeavor to promote foreign language learning by manipulating the components and mechanisms of learning and/or the conditions under which these operate. This deliberately broad definition covers an extensive variety of pedagogic and instructional approaches, methods, strategies, techniques, practices, and activities, all of which can be applied in an extensive variety of settings, although most typically in a foreign language classroom setting. Learning involves a change to the status quo, to what as of now exists. This means that the same learning object is likely to have different effects on different learners and different occasions of the same learners. These components with various emphases given to them and distinctive qualities attached to them are the premise for a progression of learning models: assessment for learning, observation, training, objective clarification, mentoring, peer-learning, simulation, instruction, concept-formation, reflection, meta-intellectual learning, critical thinking, problem-solving, and practice. These models give different emphases to the various elements of a learning environment in foreign language education context. Theoretical and contextual considerations impact, then, the study makes an exploration on how these components of teaching and learning are harmoniously realised Strategies for the foreign language classroom are situated at the interface of motivation research and classroom practice. They can be defined as instructional interventions consciously applied by foreign language teachers to elicit, enhance, and sustain student’s motivated behavior, as well as protect it from competing (and thus potentially distracting) action tendencies [1]. No single strategy can always motivate every learner in any situation because of the dynamic character of the classroom context. The effectiveness of a strategy is the result of the interaction between constellations of contextual variables; some of them are probably culture-specific, and others are culture-neutral. Such variables include approaches to learning and teaching, educational ideology, individual learners and teachers’ personality traits and emotional states, as well as the composition of the learner group [2]. Different learning environments may either enhance or neutralize the effectiveness of some strategies, but research is needed into the specifications of these learning environments. A great deal of work remained to be done in terms of submitting these recommended strategies to empirical testing, even though this line of inquiry was initiated in 1998 by Dörnyei and Csizer. Dörnyei and Csizer’s study of the motivational beliefs and practices of several teachers of English were valuable [3]. Yet, almost fifteen years on, relatively few empirical studies have been published in that vein, with most of them appearing very recently [4]. In spite of these efforts, much work remains to be done on the transferability of strategies to other cultural and ethno-linguistic contexts. This type of researches is essential if researchers are to make reasonable suggestions to educators regarding the design of motivating language learning environments. The value of self-regulated learning is in its emphasis on the individual as a pivotal agent in defining learning goals and strategies, and recognizing the issue as how that individual’s perceptions of himself or herself, accompany with learning-task characteristics, to influence the quality of language teaching and learning. Thus, this study attempts to construct a self-regulated learning environment based on foreign language classroom setting, which represents a new teaching paradigm for language teachers and learners.

Дата добавления: 2017-01-14