Brick House 8
The fact is that the grammar teachers' claim that their students can acquire a language by focusing on bricks is and has always been completely false. Nothing can come from studying a language in this way. As language teachers we
Brick House 7
A pile of bricks. That is what grammar teachers inflict on their students when they don't present the whole building to their students from the beginning of their language study. What Susan Gross says about reading, therefore, is important [bracketed
Brick House 6
When the bricks are presented from the beginning of the program of study via sound and thus as integrated and contiguous pieces of the overall house, as the learner's mind points to each brick countless times in countless arrangements of
Starve the Grammar Freak in You
Here is a direct quote from Susan Gross during one of her sessions at NTPRS. You really can't make it any more simple than this: Grammar clarifies meaning. That is its role in language. Then Susie gave the following example: a dansé =
Brick House 5
By the time each batch of bricks is labeled and "understood" by the class (as evidenced by the bogus test), as in the case of the relative pronouns brick which takes over a week or ten days to look at, and
Brick House 4
As Krashen says in Foreign Language Education - The Easy Way:
Brick House 3
Now that my vision is finally clear about this topic of grammar acquisition, I can see that, when the kids translate a reading text and, in doing so, get the image of a movie in their heads, they are learning
Brick House 2
Showing the kids how the relative pronoun bricks and all those other bricks fit together is a waste of time. It's all done in English. It's like making the kids do a picture puzzle. So few even want to complete
Brick House 1
In the past century, teachers would take a batch of bricks, grammar points arranged in chapters in books, and, laboriously, each day, boldly, inflict a kind of analytical pain session on the kids about the nature of that particular brick.