My intentions in accepting Wes Groleau’s offer to set up a blog was to enter into dialogue with people. In just offering my opinions, it seems little different from responding to posts on listservs. However, the sections like “Pat’s Worldview” and “The Basics” are indeed responses to items on the listservs but not to one in particular. Therefore, the ’worldview’ and ’basics’ entries are more discursive and personal. That leads more frequently to errors in judgment and expression. The question becomes how to correct and edit them.
If I go back and rewrite something, I get this feeling that I am cheating somehow, as if a reader is saying, “Oh, he got caught saying something stupid so now he’s running back to change it so he sounds much smarter or nicer than he actually is.” So my first attempt at rewriting (items Definitions of CLT and TPRS and Why modern language study is afraid to loosen up) finagles around and leaves in the old lines while adding new ones. I hope to get comments from readers.
Why change at all? Because readers point out to me that at points I am unclear and this leads readers to lose interest. I do want to engage readers and get comments from them. Initially I thought to get responses only from members of the listservs I am on but I see that a broad range of web browsers hit upon my blog and some read and some donÃt. What I hope to do is to get a broad range of language teachers interested in something besides just venting (although that’s certainly OK on the blog) and getting an idea for Monday morning (and that’s just fine, too); I want to address those interests but to go beyond and discover how we can derive classroom activities out of a broader base of approach and theory; to go beyond and rationalize how we work with kids (ff. suggestions: ’rationalize’ in the sense of ’put on a rational basis’).
I hope some of my readers will join us in such discussions and let me know how best to handle the edit function of this blog: leave the old stuff in or just overwrite it.