Positive psychology is a rapidly expanding subfield in psychology that has important implications for the field of second language acquisition (SLA). This paper introduces positive psychology to the study of language by describing its key tenets. The potential contributions of positive psychology are contextualized with reference to prior work,…

Pleads the case for study of classical languages in contemporary education because today's youth may take valid knowledge from history and culture of the past. (CK)

William Riley Parker's arguments favoring and supporting the post-World War II boom in language learning in America are criticized in an attempt to discover a more relevant rationale for language instruction in the 1970's. Specifically, the belief that world peace can be maintained and that international understanding can be considerably improved…

The knowledge explosion, the growth of technology, and the development of new teaching methodologies seem to the author to have led to a sense of unrelatedness, insignificance, and a loss of personal identity. The implications of this position for language teachers are viewed in terms of communication and motivation. Weaknesses of the scientific,…