Pat’s Polemics

Terry on moretprs wrote “What TPRS really makes is little, rather socially-isolated [=little vocabulary, as though they’d had little world experience] pseudo-native-speakers [people who instinctually (Continue Reading)

This from a listserv dedicated to a particular Latin textbook: “This definitely gives me food for thought as I plan to be more intentional in (Continue Reading)

I’ve changed some formatting but this post came through on a listserv and illustrates so well for me the continuing faith-based teaching that goes on. (Continue Reading)

I say, Watson, what might this mean? Hello. I am teaching Spanish 1 and would like to switch to TPRS/CI instruction. Does anyone know of (Continue Reading)

guys. requesting some patience here: I am really interested in getting a more detailed / best available idea of the natural/universal/most common order of aquisition (Continue Reading)

This so compelling a thread I just had to get into it. The input has to be compelling not b/c input that is input i.e. (Continue Reading)

Having been on 4 to 5 listservs dealing with teaching FL over the last 20 years, I’ve always been frustrated by the lack of “digging (Continue Reading)

My wife asked me to locate a medical incident in my diary in the year 2010. In the process of looking for it I noticed (Continue Reading)

It IS in 95% of my stories to the point of ,”Gosh Shirley…. Start a story with something other than, ’hay…’ Then , last year (Continue Reading)

This post came through on a listserv and I thought it so interesting that the poster confidently states the teacher used tprs. On this listserv (Continue Reading)

I.S.P. Nation (the P is for Paul), a New Zeland SLA researcher specializing in vocabulary acquisition, gives the following interesting and useful figures and facts: (Continue Reading)

I’ve always been made nervous by appeals to “brain research”. We are told there is a way to conduct our classes, to arrange our curriculum, (Continue Reading)

Reading Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul a few months ago, I came across a passage on p. 205 about sexual morality that I twisted, as (Continue Reading)

We know for certain that language cannot emerge before it is programmed to emerge. Nobody has ever made a young baby talk though it seems (Continue Reading)