"When one teaches, two learn"
Last week I posted up my “Top Teacher Training related posts″ – titled, “On the shoulders of Regular Joe Teachers” and my “Top Education related posts″. Today, I’d like to share my top Language related posts of 2010. I believe it really helps a language...
Today, I watched a CNBC episode of their new series “What the Future” (WTF). I’ll refrain from commenting on their narrative and how they provide pleasant propaganda to the masses about helping those less fortunate. I find their message of “choice not charity” rather simplistic...
** Not your ordinary, endless list – just what’s number 1. Get the full eBook 6 Billion Others 6 Billion Others is a video series of interviews with real people. All translated impeccably. They really teach us, through humans telling their own stories about fear,...
Can you be my psychiatrist? May I admit something? I’ve always had a severe sensitivity to language – especially the proclivity to pun incessantly. I kid you not – full blown Foerster’s Syndrome. It is under control but today I’ve had a hard day with...
** Not your ordinary, endless list – just what’s number 1. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language – by David Crystal I’ve long been a big fan of David Crystal. See a nice video below, to get a sense of the “gentle” man. If anyone ever...
English Language Learners and Learning Disabilities Considerations and Recommendations for Effective Remediation D. Deubelbeiss [see this post for more – here. / Also this post is a reply to this post- The Captive Mind] “If you talk to a man in a language he...
It also might be the origins of thought…… think about it. This video is fascinating. It shows music on a very intense and personal level, conveying information just like language. Music is language, the language of personal expression. Jesperson’s long ago suggested a “sing –...
“in the beginning was the word, and the word became flesh” Today I was reading Roger Cohen’s column (I’m quite his fan, never was but recently he’s take some very intelligent and courageous stands on issues from nuclear disarmament to Palestine) Loos and Language. That...
We live in and by and through words. Baudelaire famously said, “Life is a forest of symbols”, meaning, we walk through life as we would walk through words. Yet, though on one hand “words are mightier than the sword”. On the other hand, “Actions speak...
Here’s an article from this week’s Economist. Though I seldom agree with the writers there (mostly because they are so libertarian) – I love the intelligence and wit of their writers and so usually devour even their articles on the most boring of topics. This...
** Not your ordinary, endless list – just what’s number 1. Let’s not beat around the bush – no question: Thought and Language – Lev Vygotsky This book is the “Origin of Species” for language. A collosus. It has everything a mind interested in language...
The teacher must orient his work not on yesterday’s development in the child but on tomorrow’s. – Lev Vygotsky At a lecture last week, I mentioned Vygotsky and several teachers were curious and asked me for more information. It got me thinking about my own...
Pluralism is something we don’t think about too often but WE SHOULD, especially as language teachers, especially English language teachers. Part of our role, wherever we are, is to educate our students about the incredible diversity of this planet, cultural/linguistic. Educate our students to embrace...
Headlines Around the World Long ago, when lost in translation, in E. Europe, I was a copy editor for a English Chinese business magazine. I’d get the articles and polish them and send them back. This was in the very early days of the internet....
I’ve written previously on the important subject of Language Death. Every few weeks, the last speaker of a world language dies and with it, the whole inheritance/consciousness of a world’s people. We are so much less without that language — Wade Davis, a Nat. Geographic...
One of the things any ESL / EFL / ESOL teacher cannot avoid is “culture”. We deal on this playing field, a classroom/school where cultures meet and collide, even if only our own and the native culture. So it is imperative that we teachers have...
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