ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews key features of contemporary approaches to language pedagogy for postadolescent learners, with an emphasis on educational practices that foster simultaneous acquisition of both target language knowledge and communicative competence. It summarizes ideas and issues related to the following broad aspects of language pedagogy: why languages are taught and learned, and the potential contribution of task-based language teaching (TBLT) as a synthesis of best practices. Languages are taught and learned for a variety of reasons, ranging from elective language study for humanistic purposes in economically privileged societies to de facto multilingualism for survival, trade, and cultural purposes in many other societies and sectors. Although contemporary proficiency standards point to language pedagogies that result in functional communicative abilities, and it is only that language pedagogical theory has coalesced to some extent around a common set of principles. In sum, TBLT may solve a number of key problems in contemporary language pedagogy.
