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hay & tener: has this happened before?

  11/08/2015       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

I wonder with all of these observations of learner behavior if teachers read up on language acquisition in general. While there are many studies of (Continue Reading)

Old Teaching Notes
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Angel on Frank Smith

  09/05/2015       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Re Frank Smith. Second to Krashen, in whose pages I read the name Frank Smith, Frank Smith is the scholar who seems best to unite (Continue Reading)

Old Teaching Notes

A riff on Terry’s posts

  08/29/2015       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Perhaps there’s something missing in my reading of the many posts Terry is responding to. Maybe the posters have a good grasp of CI principles (Continue Reading)

Old Teaching Notes

Picking up a language from the media

  08/06/2015       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Re learning from movies/soaps/cartoons/etc. Most Desi kids i.e. those from the subcontinent, understand Hindi even if it’s not their language b/c the ever-so popular Bollywood (Continue Reading)

Old Teaching Notes

The form that stands out gets picked up

  08/04/2015       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Here’s a notion that pops up in SLA and is supported by my classroom observations: less common forms stand out and so are often picked (Continue Reading)

Old Teaching Notes

What possibility to teach SE in the face of such attitudes?

  03/30/2015       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

From Alternative Histories of English, “Good and Bad English in the United States”, Dennis B. Preston, p. 147. “The repercussion of such belief [only recalcitrance (Continue Reading)

Old Teaching Notes

Percentage of coverage of various text types by vocabulary list

  11/13/2014       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

I posted figures on the percentage of words in English borrowed from major sources, with the percentage changing depending on the size of the frequency (Continue Reading)

Old Teaching Notes

Is this tprs or ain’t it?

  10/25/2014       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

“The activities that encourage vocabulary learning through meaning-focues input incude listening to stories where the teacher notes unfamiliar words on the board or quickly explains (Continue Reading)

Old Teaching Notes

Full version of review of Larsen-Freeman

  10/25/2014       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Full version: Diane Larsen-Freemen wrote an article titled Teaching and Testing Grammar for The Handbook of Language Teaching by Long & Doughty. I thought there (Continue Reading)

Foreign language teaching & learning, Old Teaching Notes

Mistake or error?

  09/29/2014       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Overheard on the radio, an Indian speaking excellent, academic English with an accent, said “Fifty percent of the times”. I know I make errors like (Continue Reading)

Old Teaching Notes

How To Raise the 4%

  07/15/2014       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

What I’ve been doing recently raised some questions and suggestions in my mind. The lessons in my book on Greek (Anna Farmakides’ A Manual of (Continue Reading)

Old Teaching Notes

Opacity in vocabulary

  05/11/2014       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Language students and teachers often look at foreign vocabulary and see how words are made up, what constitutes them, and see how they “make sense”. (Continue Reading)

Old Teaching Notes

A response to a question….

  04/06/2014       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

“I just remembered a sentence that I learned in two college classes: “Aprender a aprender” (“Learning to learn”). I also remember another sentence from a (Continue Reading)

Old Teaching Notes

New bottles – old wine novye butylki – staroe vino

  08/19/2013       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Here’s an example of one more textbook designed to shore up the old system of rule-getting and rule-using. Other than the use of the word (Continue Reading)

Old Teaching Notes

A career-capping interview

  05/14/2013       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Yesterday two boys came to see me. What class they were supposed to be in, I didn’t ask. Both had continued on into third year (Continue Reading)

Old Teaching Notes

Poor thinking is similar across disciplines:

  04/20/2013       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Here’s some quotes from an article on diet by Gary Taubes. I was struck by how similar the intransigence of the calories in/calories out crowd (Continue Reading)

Old Teaching Notes

How grades work…….

  04/20/2013       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Ph conversation with Alfie Kohn (from Carol Jago’s With Rigor For All, pp. 60-62) CJ: Alfie, you’ve written that teachers should stop fiddling with grading (Continue Reading)

Old Teaching Notes

Cognitive defined in relation to language learning

  04/02/2013       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Over and over people have expressed a lack of awareness of the term “cognitive code” as a fl teaching methodology, yet it is pretty much (Continue Reading)

Old Teaching Notes

Why Students Don’t Like School story-telling

  03/31/2013       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

A book I checked out of my school library is titled Why Students Don’t Like School and it’s by Daniel Willingham. I was struck by (Continue Reading)

Old Teaching Notes

(No Title)

  02/24/2013       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

Here a quote from Stevick provided by Brian Barabe: “According to the Natural Approach, adults acquire a language in much the same way as infants (Continue Reading)

Old Teaching Notes

limping analogy

  10/31/2012       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

We often use the analogy of someone learning to ride a bike or drive a car for learning a fl. Do you just begin riding (Continue Reading)

Old Teaching Notes

Reading is important

  10/28/2012       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

“According to Geisler, (VP at Middlebury College) you need four things to learn a language. First, you have to use it. Second, you have to (Continue Reading)

Old Teaching Notes

How much grammar & idiomaticity can be “learned”?

  07/30/2012       Pat Barrett      Add Comment

An example of idiomaticity: in Russian, the verb “is” gets replaced by concrete verbs like “stand”, “sits”, “lies”, “hangs”. So the lamp sits on the (Continue Reading)

Old Teaching Notes
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