Open Access

Reinhard Fiehler

• In literate societies linguistic competence includes speaking as well as writing. Talking and writing are rather different activities, therefore one should expect that in foreign language teaching (and especially in german-as-foreign-language teaching) both parts are included in equal proportions. However, the practise of teaching shows that writ­ten language is dominant and spoken language lives a shadow existence (section 1). In the following I will give five reasons as to why spoken language stands in the background and why it is such a bulky and clumsy subject (section 2). After which I will characterise two points of view one can take in regards to the magnitude of the differences between spoken and written language (section 3) and I will describe some of the central differences (section 4). Finally, 1 will formulate some consequen­ces of this study for foreign language teaching, and I will argue that the difficulties connected with spoken language should be confronted, as in my opinion spoken lan­guage is an indispensable part of foreign language teaching (section 5).