"When one teaches, two learn"
Recently, I’ve chanced upon a number of articles and blog posts championing the seemingly well established idea that children are much better language learners than adults and that adults will never be able to approach native like fluency except for a few exceptions. These ideas...
Isaiah Berlin related that there are only two types of people, foxes or hedgehogs. I’m a hedgehog. A generalist. A slow plodder that sees the bigger, wider picture. When it comes to language learning, this has been very handy. It’s valuable to cut through the...
Teachers are great. But people have been learning languages for thousands of years without a teacher. It’s not only possible but actually in many ways better and more effective. Not all of these will work for you. There is no “magic bullet”, no “secret sauce”....
This lesson has a distinct vocabulary focus and gets students thinking about root words, chunks and collocations/word associations. They gain an awareness of how words can be used in many ways…. It uses the amazing video – Words. (WARNING: use this version, NOT the youtube version....
I’m busy these days with Gif Lingua and building a “gif corpus”, a collection of gifs that perfectly describe human experience. Daunting task but I’ll be inviting many others along this journey in the coming months. Up to over 60,000 perfect gifs in my library....
Listening doesn’t get enough attention in our classrooms! It should be the primary skill we teach and one which we devote the most of our time and energy. It is the motor that drives the language acquisition bus. Here are my own simple suggestions for...
It’s beta but Gif Lingua is open and ready for teachers and students. I hope you enjoy it and we are just taking the first steps in what’s going to be a wonderful journey building the site. We’ll need everyone’s help in doing so. Teachers...
“I am my language.” What a powerful phrase about how language is so wrapped up with identity. Both our own personal identity and our social identity in a larger group. A language learner aims to get to the moment where they “flow” with the language...
After writing about some strange stories I’d come across over the years regarding language learning, I remembered a few more ….. So in the interest of a comprehensive list, here are more of these strange but supposedly true stories about language. 1. Sarah Colwill overnight...
I recently came across this blog post about Six highly provocative quotes in ELT, from the 6 things blog. So I thought I’d highlight these sparkling quotes again but also add my own to compliment. A challenge to my own linguistic soul. I love a...
Debate is a great focus for the English language classroom. Students produce a lot of language but they also must internalize that language and “think” as they process the language. It really makes the English language they use, their own. My favorite “warmer” for debate...
I really love those short, sweet, “video like” gif photos and I can attest that students do too! Show GIFs to illustrate a whole number of things and as an living image, they really can be effectively used by teachers to illustrate and teach a large...
I’ve long been a member of Cowbird and it’s a sterling example of real, authentic listening/reading/watching for ELLs. Along with several other sites that are truly “authentic”, it is ranked at the top of my list. Off the top of my head, for students, I’d...
Here is a nice presentation of a lot of “functional” language. Expressions, vocabulary that students can use in certain contexts. They’ll need a teacher’s guidance to help them know the subtlties of using many of them but they are a handy reference available to members...
I highly recommend these series of videos. Not just as an anthropologist and a teacher interested in language but as a human being who understands the importance of preserving cultural/ethnic diversity, our cultural genome. I presently live in Guatemala and this episode makes a great...
I’m presently enjoying life deep in the highlands of Guatemala. It’s why I haven’t been posting regularly and fanatically. All things at their own time and pace but I’ll be back in the new year – loud, clear, full of posts! I’m taking Spanish and...
I had the luck to start teaching English at a school where I basically had free reign to teach as I saw fit. It was just after the fall of communism in the Czech Republic (then still Czechoslovakia), a beautiful spa city, Karlovy Vary. I...
Over the years, I’ve kept my eyes and ears open for great “thought experiments” for language. Real examples and events that are so extreme, they really force you to think differently about ones preconceived notions about language learning (and by default teaching it). Here are...
I haven’t written much about language recently but I’m definitely always thinking about it. It is itself a jailer, something I can’t get away from and like the adage goes “I am language”. But been thinking about language as it relates to what we teachers...
I just finished watching my daily hour of PBS news and I’m irate. Sometimes American insularity and small mindedness is cute and amusing (as De Tocqueville imagined) but sometimes it isn’t. Listening to a Republican senator ramble on about how “English First” is what true...
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