ABSTRACT
The goals of foreign language instruction have shifted considerably in the last 100 years. At the turn of the century, learning languages was primarily an intellectual exercise for the well educated (Richards & Rodgers, 1986), having nothing to do with communicating with others. Learners studied the structure of languages, memorizing long lists of words and their translations, and focusing on rules of grammar. Given this view of language, it is not surprising that the skills students developed were useless in real-life interaction.
