Foreign language vs. Second Language

These two terms are always confusing, maybe because we don't even have them clear in our mother tongue. Both are commonly used to refer another language that is learned at school, but actually they don’t have the same meaning. Let's have an example, their relationship is the same that ceiling and roof, they mean “techo” in Spanish, but there is a little difference that distinguishes them both.

• ·                The ceiling is the part that delimits the room in its upper zone.
• ·                A roof is the covering on the uppermost part of a building.

So, that’s the same as second and foreign, both refer to a language apart from our native one, but there is a little hint that separate them completely:

 We talk about a second language when we want to point a language that is useful for our quotidian life, for instance, in Ceuta, the muslin population has Dariya as mother tongue, which is spoken at home, and Spanish as second one, which is used for Education.

The foreign language is learnt for pleasure, not for the necessity of communication in our day-to-day.

In my case, my second language is English, which I use for reading, studying, watching TV and working, and Italian is a foreign language I am learning, because I don’t use it in my quotidian life currently.

To sum up, what we want to teach is a complete functional second language and make our students capable of managing in different situations, from using a social network to reading news on a newspaper, completely in English.