Archive for the ‘Language learning tips’ Category

…a dash of realism, a big dollop of the painfully obvious and a side serving of hedging their bets:

“…for teachers, the distilled research finding that positive attitudes and motivation contribute to successful learning yields little useful insight into their day-to-day problems of how to motivate little Samantha in Class 2B and keep her motivated.

Fundamentally, two key principles seem crucial to the maintenance of motivation: first, motivation must emanate from the learner, rather than be externally regulated by the teacher;second, learners must see themselves as agents of the processes that shape their motivation.” 

The first sentence is a breath of the fresh air of realism in the usually bs smelling world of applied linguistics. Not sure what to do with the information in the second sentence, in fact I’m half tempted to say it “yields little useful insight into…”. 

And so the book goes on, telling us that (in my own simplistic words, based on my limited understanding):

-When they move to a foreign country kids are more likely to get a native or near native level than adults (but we don’t know if that tells us anything relevant about students studying a few hours a week in their own country) (Chapter 2- Age and Good Language Learners- Carol Griffiths)

- The students who are more likely to progress quickly, especially at lower levels, tend to be extrovert but the ones in the top classes tend to be people who are introverted but can look at the big picture and take guesses in an intuitive (i.e. not anally retentive) way. But again, we don’t know what that means for classroom practice,e.g. whether we should just use and try to reinforce students’ strengths or whether we should concentrate on developing their weaknesses (Chapter 4- Personality and Good Language Learners- Madeline Ehrman)

-Despite not being able to come up with any statistical evidence, the writer and we all know that the fact that fitting in for boys means not being seen to be studying too hard can be a problem for teachers. Boys also have different motivations and preferred ways of learning to girls (Chapter 5- Gender and Good Language Learners- Martha Nyikos)

- Students who are in higher level classes tend to use more strategies for language learning such as reading newspapers. It can be difficult to determine if they actually do some of these things because they have a high level rather than reach the level because they do these things, and even more difficult to determine if those study skills can and should be forced on students who don’t use them (Chapter 6-Strategies and Good Language Learners- Carol Griffiths again. Is she sleeping with the editor? Oh, she is the editor…)

- Etc

Etc. being a very useful word to hide the fact that I’m making comments about the book when I’ve only read a quarter of it. Oh well, surely that’s what blogs are for- half formed judgements and thinking aloud. The real review will be along in a month or so on TEFL.net reviews. Books I’ve been flicking through that I would highly recommend are:

A History of ELT

The Experience of Language Teaching

And it is quite possible I will end up recommending Lessons from Language Learners in the end as well, now I’ve got that little rant off my chest…

“Only half of the activations in the brain were to do with the speech and language areas. The voice is not just coming from your lips. It’s coming from the whole body and you need to think about that when you’re trying to change aspects of it.” (more…)

Man, what a week! Don’t know why it always all comes together, but last week had some of the teenagers not answering a single question from an IELTS reading by the end of the time limit, a two man Business English class with mixed levels and only the higher level student doing the preparation work I had set the lower level one to help him catch up, etc. etc. Maybe they are just holding out for Xmas same as me. So, if you came here looking for inspiration, hope to see you again next week…

Luckily, though, it’s been a good weekend for using a little time mangement tip which I picked up while studying languages and which also comes in very useful when I am writing full time (as I will be again soon I hope if I have many more weeks like this- very reasonable rates, if any publishers or TEFL website editors are reading…). The trick is: (more…)

Amongst the doom and gloom that is the Lets Japan blog since the collapse of Nova became fact and there became nothing left to speculate about, comes possibly the only glimmer of hope that doesn’t involve thousands of refugee teachers flying home on their specially discounted (UNHCR?) flights- (more…)

Apart from my attempts at investigative journalism for the EL Gazette (see below) and some writing work for Usingenglish.com (details soon), another thing that has kept me off my blog recently is trying to lose the beginnings of middle age spread before it gets too late. Unfortunately, the exercise options are limited…

Cycling in Japan is fun, especially dodging people while you ride on the pavements as most people do, and you never have to feel embarrassed about jow naff your bike is as even the trendiest of Shibuya teenagers has a shopper mama chari bike, just like their mamas. The problem is with them being quite strict about making you pay to park your bike near the station and not being able to take it on the train unless it is a Transformer bike you can stick in a bag, there aren’t really that many places to cycle to from here.

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