The Future of Education

Jordan is an Arab country in which English is a first foreign language while French is a second. Whereas French is taught in most private schools and some public schools, it is only taught in three public and three private universities. Recently, however, Jordan has witnessed a rise in demand for French at the university-level. Also, since the number of public and private schools that teach French has risen to 99 and 88, respectively, the Ministry of Education has also begun to emphasize the importance of teaching French. Our research has noticed, however, that there are difficulties involved with teaching French in Jordanian schools. One of these difficulties is the methodologies applied in teaching the language.

There are several methodologies of teaching a foreign language. The European Framework of References encourages a methodology based on the communication needs of students.Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is a popular approach that considers interaction as both the means and the most important objective of learning a language.

More Recently,Task Based Language Learning(TBLL) has been used with a great deal of interest[1].

The aim of this research is to :

1. Investigate the methodologies used in teaching French in Jordanian Schools.
2. Suggest alternative methodologies that can better meet the needs of the students.

To do so, we will sample four schools privately-run and four from the public sector, limiting population age to 14-15 years.The observation of the classes will be realised by usining video recordings. We will use a customized grid to analyse the methodologies and the type of interaction between professor and students employed in the classes.