Teaching English as a second language gathers:

A concern with real people in real situations, often in heterogeneous speech-communities (such as classrooms) and with differential levels of competence in various respects.

Acquisition of competence can be seen (by language teaching practitioners) to involve both sociocultural and non-cognitive factors.

The concept of communicative competence inspires a whole new way of looking at things, i.e. one must pay attention to all verbal features which subtend successful communication, and these are more than grammatical competence.

Polished logical-syntactic perception is an elegant and well-structured domain, where linguistic knowledge is held and expressed by students, but often incomplete and in a difficult way for understand how to correct errors in the classroom.

Exclusive literary and academic arguments from the mother tongue, moving the student away from his or her root language.