Teaching quote of the day
“(Rod Ellis) recommends holding off teaching grammar to beginning students because the early stages of acquisition are primarily lexically rather than grammatically based and because of the evidence from immersion programs that learners are able to acquire word order and ’salient inflection’ without direct instruction” Nick C. Ellis in Form-focused Instruction and Teacher Education- Studies in honour of Rod Ellis
Makes a lot of sense to me. This might be a good place also to make a mention of New Inside Out Beginner (Macmillan), which I had a thorough look at yesterday and was mighty impressed by. It manages to fit in easy bits that are often missed out even at this low level (e.g. colours) and useful language that doesn’t usually get covered properly at any level (e.g. What is your favourite…?/ What is your dream job?) without having the usual bittiness of books that try to fit too many points in (e.g. Natural English).