Open Access

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).