by Terry Waltz | Nov 25, 2015 | General
On a popular instant messaging platform, someone recently said: Discomfort must be your friend if you´re learning a language. Sts aren´t used to this mindset – it takes time. Struggle is normal. Is it, though? Must students show “grit”, and...
by Terry Waltz | Nov 20, 2015 | Methods, Reading, Speaking/Listening
On a teachers’ mailing list, someone recently commented that some students were reading the Spanish word “hace” (pronounced Ah-say) to rhyme with “face” in English. This error is very interesting to me. In reading Chinese, we don’t...
by Terry Waltz | Nov 17, 2015 | General
The point, I think, is that the balance point between theory and practice — the point where theory interests teachers who have five preps a day and a stupid faculty meeting at 3:30 — does not exist at the extreme of theory, where it’s being put. It...
by Terry Waltz | Nov 15, 2015 | General
On a teachers’ mailing list, the comment was posted: But these [TPRS skills] are training wheels, the “CI teaching FUNDAMENTALS,” so that teachers can internalize the ART of communicating comprehensibly. When you are talking about a large number of...
by Terry Waltz | Nov 13, 2015 | General, Methods
Well, there isn’t any. If you’re teaching a kid over the age of (whatever), they already understand the concepts of cause and effect, conditionality, future, past, and so on. Grammar is just the way language expresses the relationships between things and...