The Cambridge Introduction to Applied Linguistics

Have you ever been sitting in a language classroom and thought to yourself, “When am I ever going to use this in real life?” Having learned phrases like “Le singe est sur la branche” (“The monkey is on the branch”) in his French classes in school, the British comedian Eddie Izzard joked that whenever he traveled to France, he always had to bring a monkey with him and walk around heavily wooded areas just so that he could fit this phrase into everyday conversation. If you’ve ever had to take a language class to fulfill a general education requirement, you’ve probably experienced what some teachers jokingly refer to as the “LNOP” approach, or “Language for No Obvious Purpose” (Trace, Hudson, & Brown, 2015, p. 3). This approach is often a response to the fact that, in many classes, it can be impossible to cater to all of the various interests and goals of a diverse group of learners. When a group of students is learning a language for a specific purpose, however, teachers have the opportunity to design much more tailored language instruction.