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| "A foreign language is a
language not spoken by the people of a certain
place. It is also a language not spoken in the
native country of the person referred to, i.e. an
English speaker living in Japan can say that
Japanese is a foreign language to him or her.
These two characterizations do not exhaust the
possible definitions, however, and the label is
occasionally applied in ways that are variously
misleading or factually inaccurate...... Most
schools around the world teach at least one foreign
language. By 1998 nearly all students in
Europe studied at least one foreign language as
part of their compulsory education, the only
exception being
Ireland, where primary and secondary
schoolchildren learn both
Irish and English, but neither is considered a
foreign language (although Irish pupils do study a
third European language).... In some countries,
learners have lessons taken entirely in a foreign
language: for example, more than half of European
countries with a minority/regional language
community use partial immersion to teach both the
minority and the state language....Some children
learn more than one language from birth or from a
very young age: they are
bilingual or
multilingual. These children can be said to have
two or more mother tongues: neither language is
foreign to that child, even if one language is a
foreign language for the vast majority of people in
the child's birth country."
Source:
Wikipedia |
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