The second most important task is speech recognition. Until relatively recently, language teachers were often the only individuals at hand to produce human speech in another language. That has changed radically. In modern times, human speech is ubiquitous, at every corner of your life and in any language you want. As a consequence, audio CDs, audio books, Internet news, and TV, have supplanted teachers as prime speech sources. The impact of teachers on the third, fourth and fifth tasks – speaking, reading, and writing – is equally limited. Writing comes as a bonus of reading, reading as a bonus of word learning, and as you will see in.
