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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

As Nayoung and I have just had our baby boy – Leon Jaewoo – I may as well do a write up on multilingual children and the common methods surrounding the raising of them. Obviously, we would love for our boy to grow up as a coordinate bilingual of English and Korean… but how are [...]

What are the aims in the classroom when we teach pronunciation? Or more importantly, what should the aims be?

Many a school policy is designed to teach the “native” model of pronunciation, but is this a realistic notion? Not only does research suggest that the so-called “native” models of English are amongst the least intelligible but [...]

Krashen introduced the theory that we acquire language via comprehensible input. That is to say that if we are exposed to language at a level we understand then we can begin to acquire it. This ties in with my strong support of Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, which can be basically broken down by saying [...]

This is a difficult question to answer. As teachers we like to think that we know, but do we actually know?

Personally, I have my doubts. I mean sure, we know how we are supposed to teach and what we are supposed to teach, but each student is an individual and pleasing everybody all of the [...]