On a language teaching group, a comment was recently posted: My end conclusion: The success of a method depends a lot on the personality of the teacher and how well it fits the method of choice and allows the teacher to reach the most students. In other words, whether or not students learn has a lot […]
Posts Tagged ‘Acquisition’
Vocabulary Lists and Items and Proficiency
Posted by Terry Waltz on December 30th, 2014
There was some discussion of “the most important phrases to learn” in a new language (as there always is) recently on some “how to learn languages” blog, and the list — no need to link to it, it was quite ordinary and predictable — provided a great many questions and absolutely no way for […]
Posted in General, Methods 
Tags: Acquisition, Vocabulary 
Comments Off on Vocabulary Lists and Items and Proficiency“Your class has a reputation for being ‘easy’…”
Posted by Terry Waltz on November 22nd, 2014
(You say that like it’s a bad thing…) More people (including other language teachers!) trying to stuff the acquisition of new languages into the same mold that fits fact-based disciplines, like — well, like everything else. I can understand clueless monolingual administrators who hated their own hours in high school Spanish doing that. Their experience […]
Posted in General, Methods Tags: Acquisition, Comprehensible Input, Theory, TPRS Comments Off on “Your class has a reputation for being ‘easy’…”Tagging for acquisition
Posted by Terry Waltz on November 3rd, 2011
We can’t see exactly how the brain works its magic in generalizing from many examples to just knowing what structure to automatically use to express a meaning it has never tried to express before — which is what fluent speakers can do. What if we think of it in terms of tagging? It’s sort of […]
Posted in Curriculum, General Tags: Acquisition, Comprehensible Input, Curriculum Tagging, Repetition, Theory Comments Off on Tagging for acquisitionUnknowns and Comprehension
Posted by Terry Waltz on November 1st, 2011
On a language teachers’ group, a comment was recently posted to the effect that maybe language didn’t have to be 100% comprehensible, because a young native speaker could go for a long time before asking what a key word meant. Maybe, the poster offered, comprehension could be delayed and still be comprehension? There’s a very […]
Posted in General, Speaking/Listening Tags: Acquisition, Native Speaker, Unknowns Comments Off on Unknowns and Comprehension