FOREIGN LANGUAGES IN THE 21ST CENTURY: DEVELOPMENTS, TENDENCIES, PERSPECTIVES

Abstract

Learning foreign languages is one of the main priorities of society in the beginning of 21st century. Till the 60’s and 70’s of the 20th century, foreign languages had been considered the prerogative of well-educated, rich and noble people, while nowadays they have become an integral part of everyday life for the majority. The author of the article aims to analyze some aspects of development, tendencies and perspectives of foreign languages in the 21st century in the EU member countries in the context of globalization. Based on the examples of some European school systems, we conducted high-quality retrospective analysis to research organizational issues of foreign languages teaching. The problems of foreign languages learning and multilingualism are characterized here. The article deals with the establishment of the quantitative distribution of foreign languages in modern Europe and historical tendencies which were inherent to that process. The correlation between the most spoken and learnt languages was analyzed, as well as the role of German in this context. The perspectives of foreign languages development and usage for international communication have been underlined; the role of foreign languages teaching and learning has been established; the main teaching methods that are dominant nowadays have been specified. Without claiming the comprehensiveness of the problem under study, the author aimed to combine the empirical levels of analysis and formulate generally accepted judgments concerning the development of foreign languages in the 21st century. Therefore, it is worthwhile to outline the following promising and important direction of research, namely: analysis of the main motivational components of foreign languages learning by different age groups in the European Union.