Language education is the teaching and learning

Learning

Learning is acquiring new or modifying existing knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals and some machines. Progress over time tends to follow learning curves.Human learning...

 of a foreign

Foreign language

A foreign language is a language indigenous to another country. It is also a language not spoken in the native country of the person referred to, i.e. an English speaker living in Japan can say that Japanese is a foreign language to him or her...

 or second language

Second language

A second language or L2 is any language learned after the first language or mother tongue. Some languages, often called auxiliary languages, are used primarily as second languages or lingua francas ....

. Language education is a branch of applied linguistics

Applied linguistics

Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study that identifies, investigates, and offers solutions to language-related real-life problems...

.
People need to learn a second language because of globalization

Globalization

Globalization refers to the increasingly global relationships of culture, people and economic activity. Most often, it refers to economics: the global distribution of the production of goods and services, through reduction of barriers to international trade such as tariffs, export fees, and import...

; connections are becoming inevitable among nations, states and organizations which create a huge need for knowing another language or more multilingualism

Multilingualism

Multilingualism is the act of using, or promoting the use of, multiple languages, either by an individual speaker or by a community of speakers. Multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. Multilingualism is becoming a social phenomenon governed by the needs of...

. The uses of common languages are in areas such as trade, tourism, international relations between governments, technology, media and science.