Pat’s Polemics

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

“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)

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)

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)

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)

“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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

“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)

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)