Language and Cultural Encounters: Opportunities for Interaction with Native Speakers

Language learning has at times been put into two categories: the monastery and the market-place approaches. The monastery approach refers to organized language learning in a classroom with students and a teacher following a formal, rule-based plan while the market-place approach would involve being in a context where the language is spoken, not specically to learn the language but using it to get something done (McArthur, 1991). What we discuss in this chapter would fall between the two because, on the one hand, it involves the direct intention to learn the language and also diering degrees of assistance available for the learning process but, on the other, it provides opportunities for developing communicative competence outside the classroom.