You hear it all the time and I’m sure you’ve heard it before… The struggling learner with the ‘once a month’ study plan says it. The person that studied Spanish in high school while reading a comic book and not paying attention says it. The ‘average’ L1 English-speaker says it… It’s the monolingual catchphrase: ”I don’t have a talent for languages”
Rubbish.
Everyone has a ‘talent’ for language… it’s an in-built mechanism. We are human. We have language. But what do they truly mean when they say that they “don’t have a talent”? Click here to read more.. »
Over the last year or so I have given papers at a number of conferences throughout the region. These conferences have primarily involved discussions within TESOL and Applied Linguistics but have also crossed-over into the related realms of general education, lifelong learning and learning disorders.
There have been some great presentations at the conferences I’ve attended (..and some not-so-great!). Click here to read more.. »
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 story for another time.
Today we talk about Arabic itself. What are the differences between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and the colloquial or vernacular varieties? Which is intrinsically the best Arabic to learn? Click here to read more.. »
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 perfection, I’m of the opinion that it is possible to sound like a native, but the issue is, is it necessary.. Click here to read more.. »
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 can flick on or off when we reach our interpretation of fluency, it’s not easily defined across the board. Yes, we can look at something like CEFR or ILR scales (both in the Language Proficiency Scales post) but they’re still open to subjective analysis. Click here to read more.. »
