We now know what everyone needs to do to learn a language
Before you look at our theory in detail, maybe you’d like to look at some of our other books in the same series:
- We now know how to cure all mental illness
- We now know how to reintergrate all child molesters into society
- We now know how to teach football to people with two left feet
- We now know how to make all strikers regain their confidence
- We now know how to cure all anorexics
- We now know the meaning of life
- We now know what all British parents should do to stop their kids turning into teenage brats
- We now know exactly how the brain works
- We now know how to motivate people who have no interest in something
- We now know how to make people forget all their previous educational traumas
Not convinced by the ones above? Well, they are all topics that a lot more time, money and effort have gone into than have gone into SLA and Applied Linguistics, so you might want to leave universal theories of second language learning for a while too- especially as the last few would all have to be solved before we could even start working out how to make a theory of language teaching…
January 25th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Dear Alex,
A few things:
- I have not been updating the blog for a while. It has been part burnout and part pursuing other things.
- I did a google search on “Alex Case” and this site was the first result.
- I agree: We will never know what the best way to learn a language is. However, I meet a lot of teachers here (especially older ones) who think that they do know and try to force their philosphy on their students. (Sometimes all I want to do is vent and that keeps me from writing on my blog.)
I think that a teacher should be aware of a variety of ways to teach English and attempt to use an appropriate methodology with the type of learners they are working with. For example, I was teaching nursing English to forty 19 – 21 year-olds and found that the way of teaching that got me the best results was plain old PPP. However, I used the same text book with twenty-seven 20 – 40 years olds and found (after some trial and error) that they prefered more inductive type activities where they tried to work out the meaning of a dialogue or text before I explained to them a rule or new word.
January 25th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
Hi Jamie
Good to hear from you, feel free to vent here instead of your blog anytime you like.
I am so glad to hear you say that about textbooks working well or badly with different students, because this post is just a lead in to a rather unbelievable post on just that subject, coming up next…