My books are available as PDFs, which will open and can be read on a Kindle. You can use a registered Kindle’s “Send-to-Kindle” email address to send your PDF to your Kindle via email, or you can upload the PDF directly from your computer to the Kindle by using a USB cable. If you’re not sure […]
If you’ve ever tried to update or overhaul a website, you know how much time it takes. The “free stuff” from my former site will for that reason be delayed for some months, as I try to attend to all the details of updating 15 years of material here this winter/spring. I apologize for the
If you scroll down to the bottom of the categories list, you will see both the “When Attacked” and the “When Observed” categories. These two were created to help teachers who are (a) undergoing any kind of scrutiny in their buildings (usually it’s from colleagues or parents who don’t understand how people acquire languages), and
A great hypocrisy when an admin asks you during a pre-observation meeting “What will the students be able to do after the lesson?” is to answer it. The real answer to that question is “It can’t be measured” but most of us don’t say that. But that answer is as per fifty years of research.
What about rigor? Some language teachers say that teaching using comprehensible input is too “easy” for the students and so they succeed too much, earning “too many” A’s. The answer to that question is that teaching with comprehensible input definitely seems easy to students and is certainly different from most of their classes. But the
The Chef Everything rests upon the main research idea that language acquisition is an unconscious process. Here’s an image to drive the point home: The unconscious mind is like a chef whose kitchen is located in the basement of our students’ unconscious minds. The vegetables and broth and other ingredients are the comprehensible input that
The Chef Everything rests upon the main research idea that language acquisition is an unconscious process. Here’s an image to drive the point home: The unconscious mind is like a chef whose kitchen is located in the basement of our students’ unconscious minds. The vegetables and broth and other ingredients are the comprehensible input that
Noam Chomsky Noam Chomsky said, back in the 1960s: “Grammar [is] acquired by virtually everyone, effortlessly, rapidly, in a uniform manner, merely by living in a community under minimal conditions of interaction, exposure, and care.” Look at the words that Chomsky used there: community, care, effortless exposure, interaction. Such words evoke what Lev Vygotsky was
A Big Pill The idea that we have no control over how languages are acquired and cannot think our way to acquisition is a big pill to swallow for many language teachers. After all, many of us who are not native speakers learned our second languages by reflecting in high school and college on how
When we get observed, we often realize how truly out of touch our evaluators are. They don’t get the research. It makes for a very nervous few days of pre-observation and then the observation itself. It’s like a hospital administrator trying to figure out what a surgeon is doing wrong before a surgery – they
Personalized discussion provides the glue for the process. During the class we don’t go out of bounds – we keep things simple for our students by only introducing new vocabulary in the form of reading. When we only use language in class that they already know, we get the Din going (Krashen) because they understand
