What should students do in learning foreign language? Vocabularies, grammar, or what? Well I think students should first find why they want to learn a certain foreign language. They should consider the purpose and the reason why they learn such language.
The motivation is the first step. Once the motivation is achieved, students fill creatively learn the language by their own style like reading, watching movies, listening to the music, all are conducted informally but the result is sometimes effective in some respects.
Formal foreign language education can be achieved at school or private course. Commonly, formal education has specific curriculum based on some teaching approaches, theory, and techniques. Approaches are divided into two, there are teacher centered and student centered. While theories are dealing with the basic way how language should be learned. For examples, Genre Based Approach, CTL, Audio-Lingual, and still many more. When we are talking about device and how should teacher do in delivering teaching the classroom, is called teaching technique.
There are many people who are successful enough in learning foreign language independently without teacher's intervention. However, in the recent age, teacher is necessary but not dominant. This approach is called student centered which is widely believed to be the most effective approach while in fact there is no perfect approach but it all depend on the situation and condition.
