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Posts Tagged ‘discussion’

The Truth About Arabic

May 11th, 2010 Andee 2 comments

There’s no doubt that the people from the Middle East are very proud people. They are proud of their country, of their history and of their language. Except when speaking English… many of those I speak to wish to lose all traces of the  markers that identify them as being from the region. But that’s a [...]

Accents: Native or Not

May 10th, 2010 Andee 2 comments

Our friend Ultimate Attainment is back again. He’s someone we’re talking about a lot in my seminars lately and unfortunately, certain people do believe the falsehoods about sounding like “native” being the ultimate. It’s also a fundamental aspect of my dissertation (specifically dealing with English in Korea).. but that’s another story.
When it comes to accentual [...]

What is Fluency?

May 3rd, 2010 Andee 3 comments

Are you fluent?
It’s a pretty simple question. The answers are more than subjective.
To a non-language learner there seems to be the consensus that this question is a definitive yes or no. So not true. Everybody has their own interpretation of what fluency is and while there is a switch in all of us that [...]

Bilingual Children and Literacy

April 30th, 2010 Andee No comments

As a follow-up to the Multilingual Children post a while back, this is a question we’ve been pondering lately… How do you develop and maintain literacy in the home language without formal instruction?
The obvious way as we are both teachers is to actively teach our son how to write and give him written tasks as [...]

Accent Training for the Teacher?

April 28th, 2010 Andee No comments

Many that are involved in language – teachers and learners both - are hung up on the pronunciation aspects of things. Most of these people focus on the learner and how to improve their accent in their target language, and this is something that a lot of people are interested in. It’s the old ultimate attainment argument. Everyone [...]

Study Materials: LingQ

April 27th, 2010 Andee No comments

First in the series of looking at study materials is going to be LingQ.
LingQ is the brainchild of Steve Kaufmann (who you can find on my Blogroll over there —-> …and down a bit). Steve speaks a number of languages very well and the site is very much a mirror of his own preferred learning [...]

Acquisition or Learning?

January 27th, 2010 Andee No comments

Something that is currently being debated in several circles is just how an additional language is added to one’s arsenal. There is of course the more traditional idea that we learn a language through dedication, study and hard work. And there is the fanciful idea that we simply acquire a language. Like many things in [...]

Teaching Culture

November 3rd, 2009 Andee 1 comment

Culture in the classroom.. is this something that the students need or want? This argument can very much go both ways and much of it relies on what exactly your students want, but one model for the classroom isn’t likely to please everyone… as you’re not doubt aware.

On the one hand we have the ongoing [...]

Which Pronunciation?

October 25th, 2009 Andee No comments

I’m sure as language teachers that this thought goes through our head a fair bit. It’s not a difficult decision for most languages since there is the standard. And yes, while there are varying dialects and accents, there is typically the one golden standard that we can revert to. Let our students fall back on [...]

L1 Tests, L2 Setting

October 10th, 2009 Andee No comments

I’m sure if you’ve been a teacher for any length of time you will have stumbled more than once at creating a valid and reliable test for your classroom. The question is, why are we always struggling along attempting to reinvent the wheel? Countless people before us have researched and implemented successful assessments for the [...]