This course examines key issues in language learning and teaching to ensure that all students have a common theoretical understanding of this complicated field. These include themes such as second language acquisition, language teaching approaches and methods, the language curriculum and motivation and attitudes to language learning. The course explores how theories of language learning have resulted in approaches to language education such as grammar translation, audio-lingual, direct method and communicative language teaching. These in turn have resulted in methodology such as task-based learning which is one of the sub-topics to be considered in the course.