Read an article on learning languages. Six sentences have been removed from the article.

You come across so many ways of learning a language: through CDs, the Internet,

magazines, books and so on. All these aids motivate you to go on, but you wonder if there is any real need for teachers anymore. My language-learning career started off badly. All I remember of my first French lesson at an English Secondary School is copying down the parts of the verb “to be” and my teacher’s strict orders: “Learn it!”

To me, an 11-year old who had never left England, the ‘verb table’ looked like a mysterious mathematical formula and made just about as much sense. 1. ___________. Teachers today tend to agree. Instead of using the old grammar/translation methods, they teach students in their classes how to achieve simple tasks and express everyday feelings using role-plays, games and other exercises which require them to speak, make mistakes and thus improve. 2._______________________________________. Its emphasis is on interacting rather than learning structural details of a language.

Before, people had to struggle in a traditional classroom. 3. _________________. For example, after university, the BBC’s book Discovering Portuguese gave me enough of the language to go shopping, order in restaurants and learn about Portuguese life and culture. It came with a cassette of real-life recordings of people speaking the language at full speed and exercises which made you listen hard to understand what they were saying. Self-study courses provide a relatively easy and cheap way to start learning foreign languages. 4. __________________. But the teachers do have a point.

Without someone there to give you instant correction, to demand that you try to pronounce that difficult word, and even to get you to open the book on days when you don’t feel like it, you won’t make much progress. 5. ________________________. The school I attended in London pioneered the communicative method in the 1950s and 1960s.

I was in a class with only five people. Over ten weeks, for two evenings a week we progressed through a rich diet of role-play and exercises, some from text books, some devised specially for us by our teacher, ranging from how to introduce friends to how to reject invitations politely. 6. ________________________________. You have to tell the other students what you really think, want and feel, and using your own language is forbidden.