What we know about second language acquisition Education researcher and trainer Dylan Wiliam tweeted this abstract today. The study concerned has analysed 71 peer-reviewed studies in order to find out the optimal conditions for learning a second language. Here is the relevant part for teachers of French in the UK, or teachers of English in France: (1)... L2 learners with little L2 exposure require explicit instruction to master grammar; (2) L2 learners with strong L2 aptitude, motivation, and first language (L1) skills are more successful; (3) Effective L2 teachers demonstrate sufficient L2 proficiency, strong instructional skills, and proficiency in their students’ L1; (4) L2 learners require 3-7 years to reach L2 proficiency, with younger learners typically taking longer but more likely to achieve close-to-native results. Point (3) raises an interesting question: are native French speakers teaching in the UK, and perhaps with imperfect English, at a disadvantage in some cases.
Tim Ferriss’ Meta-Learning Methods – Chapter Notes | Razaberrys What follows is the one pager of the Meta-Learning chapter of Tim Ferriss Four Hour Chef (the first part of CaFE is one-paging whatever you’re learning). You can get the full chapter and method notes from the Four Hour Chef’s meta-learning section here. “It is possible to become worldclass in just about anything in six months or less. Armed with the right framework, you can seemingly perform miracles” – Tim Ferriss The Two Guiding Principles Failure Points. DiSSS – Planning Your Attack Deconstruction – The Minimum Learnable Units “Students are subordinate to materials…Material beats method.” – Tim Ferriss “When you have the best and tastiest ingredients, you can cook very simply and the food will be extraordinary because it tastes like what it is.” – Alice Waters, founder of Chef Panissee Break the skill down into bite-sized pieces & identify all failure points and all fundamental principles. Selection – Choose The Best 20% To Focus On “Simple works. Sequencing – The Order In Which You’ll Learn
Les personnages dans La Peste Séquence 2 Nous allons étudier le roman de Camus en Oeuvre Intégrale (OI) : vous devrez avoir la connaissance la plus fine possible de ce roman. Comment faire ? Lire le roman, mais surtout le relire et l'annoter ! En effet, d'ici la fin de l'année, vous aurez tellement lu qu'il vous faut des notes pour retenir tout cela ! (photo de zimpenfish) Lire, c'est bien, mais relire, stylos et petits papiers en main, c'est mieux ! How A Complete Idiot (Me) Learned Conversational Spanish and How You Can Too — My Latin Life Step 1: Spanish with Michel Thomas If you are green as nopales when it comes to Spanish (i.e. 50 words or less) start with Michel Thomas. He'll quickly introduce you to the basics and provide you with a strong foundation. The learning process is surprisingly effortless and with each lesson you'll feel like you are making real progress. He also insists on not taking any notes, so it's an easy course to complete on your morning commute. Step 2: Rocket Spanish Rocket Spanish is one of the best resources for learning Spanish because they really help you nail down the pronunciation, as well as the basics of the language. Step 3: Pimsleur AND Duolingo Step 2 will ruin you, but it's important that you stay strong and don't give up. Step 4: Memrise and Cue Cards By now you should have a strong understanding of how the language is structured. Step 5: Destinos and Ben y Marina Step 6: Spanish films with Spanish subtitles There are also some great telenovelas from Latin America. Step 8: Immersion Vance
On Language, Texting, & Being I can speak some French. I took it all through school but learned it mostly when writing my dissertation which involved several French books that were, at the time, not yet translated. And for the books that were translated, I read the French not for accuracy per se but to get a sense for the writing — its style, its rhythm, its mode of being. Now, I love translations. I find the act of translation as amazing and erotic (such intimacy with another) as it is impossible (however actual). Anyway, at that point, my French wasn’t terrible (this was 15 years ago). We imagine, perhaps, that language is a tool much as, say, a hammer is. But that’s not how language works. And each language is different, asks different things of us — the French tu wants something different from me than the German du and, in the process, makes something different of me. When I was in grad school, I had to prove proficiency in two languages so, other than French, I chose classical Greek. Oh, was I wrong.
How to Learn Czech for Your Trip to Prague - Eastern European Travel So you have that Prague trip booked and now you are feeling adventurous and smart at the same time — you want to learn Czech. Good for you! There are not a lot of casual Czech learners and in general, the language gets an undeserved reputation for being too hard and not too useful. At the same time, having at least a bit of Czech knowledge makes your travels to this beautiful country ten times more exciting. All in all, if you want to learn Czech, it’s a great way to connect with others during your trip, as well as a cool idea in general since you can use it as a gateway to other Slavic languages like Russian. First things first: Letting go of prejudices Learners and natives alike will be quick to warn you how difficult the language is. Let that go. First off, even though there are some grammatical quirks and a few sounds you will never seem to get right, Czech is anything but a ninja level hard to learn language. All the words seem Greek to me! Funky sounds Czech natives
Strategies for Developing Listening Skills Language learning depends on listening. Listening provides the aural input that serves as the basis for language acquisition and enables learners to interact in spoken communication. Effective language instructors show students how they can adjust their listening behavior to deal with a variety of situations, types of input, and listening purposes. They help students develop a set of listening strategies and match appropriate strategies to each listening situation. Listening Strategies Listening strategies are techniques or activities that contribute directly to the comprehension and recall of listening input. Top-down strategies are listener based; the listener taps into background knowledge of the topic, the situation or context, the type of text, and the language. listening for the main idea predicting drawing inferences summarizing listening for specific details recognizing cognates recognizing word-order patterns Listening for Meaning Figure out the purpose for listening.
100 best language self-learning resources We often find ourselves recommending products for self-learning foreign languages, and we thought it’d be useful to compile a list for your reference. We have included some of our own products only where we are convinced they deserve a place in the list, and we have included both paid and free study resources without discrimination. Everything on this list deserves your attention, but resources we're particularly fond of, the kind we'd use ourselves, are marked with a little star. Online courses Self-teaching can be much more effective than regular courses, but every once in a while, even self-learners need to ask a question, or receive words of motivation and support. Created by the inventor of ReCaptcha, the ubiquitous am-i-a-robot checker Duolingo has quickly become the leading free language-learning website. These excellent online courses are composed of interactive mini lessons. Udemy is a repository of video courses on every imaginable topic. The ultimate language self-learning guide
The many reasons (29 so far) why we DON'T succeed in learning languages, and retorts for why we can. Let's hear your reasons/solutions in the comments! Today’s post is my serious attempt to collect every possible reason why we don’t learn a language in list format, and to offer possible suggestions to overcome them, or to request your solutions to these problems! I will be updating this list to add new reasons based on your comments. (Note that in the post after this, I am looking for the opposite to reasons why we can’t and I want to hear your success stories that could potentially inspire millions of people!) I am genuinely going to try to get the number of reasons and their possible retorts up to the high double digits, because I want there to be no more excuses for us to remain monolingual throughout our lives. If any of these apply to you, please consider my reply to them seriously and follow the links in each point to blog posts where I dive into it in more detail. As an engineer, I do feel many problems can be looked at analytically and a possible solution offered up when you think about it logically enough! 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.
Bilingual Mind: Understanding How the Brain Speaks Two Languages Learning to speak was the most remarkable thing you ever did. It wasn’t just the 50,000 words you had to master to become fluent or the fact that for the first six years of your life you learned about three new words per day. It was the tenses and the syntax and the entire scaffolding of grammar, not to mention the metaphors and allusions and the almost-but-not-quite synonyms. But you accomplished it, and good for you. Humans are crude linguists from the moment of birth — and perhaps even in the womb — to the extent at least that we can hear spoken sounds and begin to recognize different combinations language sounds. “Before 9 months of age, a baby produces a babble made up of hundreds of phonemes from hundreds of languages,” said Elisabeth Cros, a speech therapist with the Ecole Internationale de New York. (MORE: How Terror Hijacks the Brain) Excelling on the Stroop test is hardly a marketable skill, but what it suggests about the brain is something else.
Visible Thinking Routines for Blogging Our school‘s fabulous PE teacher, Claire Arcenas, is bringing blogging to her PE classes. She is incorporating Visual Thinking Routines to help her students become reflective commenters. In a recent planning session, she reminded me of the book Making Thinking Visible by Ron Ritchard, Mark Church, and Karin Morrison, that I had download but not read yet. We then started diving into the core routines outlined on Visible Thinking from Harvard University. The core routines are a set of seven or so routines that target different types of thinking from across the modules. Each one of these routines seemed well suited to help guide students in quality blog post writing as well as commenting. Here is our first attempt: Blogging as Information/Research Research- What have you read that has informed your position? Purpose– What kind of thinking is involved- To make sense of a concept that I am trying to understand or wrapping my mind around. Blogging as Reflection Blogging as Documentation
5 Reasons Language Learners Should Acquire More Vocabulary Posted on 25. Nov, 2013 by meaghan in Language Learning, Trends “While without grammar little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed.” – David Wilkins New language learners may assume that learning grammar is more important than learning vocabulary. 1. As Mr. Image © oatsy40 on flickr.com In his book, Vocabulary Myths, ESL teacher Keith Folse tells of his adventure to the supermarket in Japan. 2. Did you know your brain processes languages using two different memory systems? The cool part, though, is that much of what was originally thought to be processed by the procedural memory is actually declarative. 3. Image © aarmono on flickr.com It’s just like running—many runners do it to train for another sport. Think about how much easier it would be to read a novel in your second language if you didn’t have to look up 10 new words on every page. 4. Sometimes learning grammar can be downright demoralizing. Vocabulary, sweet, reliable vocabulary, won’t put you down. 5.
Recognising the power of voice recording | Education | Guardian Weekly Gone are the days when "computer assisted language learning" (Call) was restricted to practising writing, reading and listening skills. The emergence of web 2.0 tools and the development of mobile and tablet applications are offering numerous ways for students to explore their own voice by recording themselves speaking. The teacher can then listen and provide feedback on their oral performance or get students to peer review or even self-review their work. Amongst the tools I have been experimenting with at the University of Warwick are MyBrainShark, Vocaroo and MailVu. Vocaroo has to be one of the easiest tools I have ever used for making simple audio recordings. For higher levels, MyBrainshark offers interesting opportunities. All these tools can encourage autonomous learning and students are not just limited to using the computer as their device of choice. One great thing about all these tools is that they can be used to contribute towards an e-portfolio.
Educational Leadership:Instruction That Sticks:Strategies That Make Learning Last Daniel T. Willingham The second way is by illuminating fundamental principles of how students think and learn. Every teacher has a theory of how children learn; the theory may be unstated, but every teacher takes actions (or refrains from taking them) in the belief that doing so will help kids learn better. If researchers could offer principles of memory that are relatively universal across students, materials, and contexts, now that would help educators. Learning to Teach Oneself In the early years of schooling, we don't expect students to be able to guide their own learning; the teacher is largely responsible for creating classroom experiences that lead to student learning. Researchers have asked college students how they study, and the results show that most use inefficient strategies (Hartwig & Dunlosky, 2012; Kornell & Bjork, 2007). These results fit well with another, highly informal finding from my own teaching. What Students Typically Do Clearly the first strategy is not optimal.