No, I haven’t turned religious; it’s just the title of a great book I just finished. It’s by William F. Pitts, deceased, who did field (Continue Reading)
No, I haven’t turned religious; it’s just the title of a great book I just finished. It’s by William F. Pitts, deceased, who did field (Continue Reading)
This to me is at the heart of the controversies in foreign language teaching. Teachers believe that teaching the intricate grammatical, phonological and syntactic rules (Continue Reading)
Recently in a post on a listserv a member showed a great deal of concern about a statement that an American had gone to France, (Continue Reading)
The following post to a listserv speaks to the whole issue of why have any sort of professional organization. Here ’tis: I never thought I’d (Continue Reading)
As I was reconfiguring my library I came across a book titled Teaching Spanish-Speaking Children by L.S. Tireman, published in 1951. I was 10 and (Continue Reading)
In response to a job-seeker highly qualified to teach Chinese EXCEPT for not having a h.s. certificate, I responded on a List thus: Having seen (Continue Reading)
Over and over again, good-hearted people join the bandwagon of grammar mavens. Grammar maven is a term coined by William Safire as ’language maven’, as (Continue Reading)
On one of the foreign language teacher listservs the incident at Virginia Tech was discussed in a few posts. One in particular was poignant: a (Continue Reading)
Whenever teachers get to talking about the good old days, I get a sneaking suspicion that either they are not old enough to remember those (Continue Reading)
M.W. posted the following to a listserv: *Pat, I teach Spanish. *I want the grammar for communication. *I also would like to know how much (Continue Reading)
I finally read all 200 posts on the thread started by the SLA (Second Language Acquistion) researcher and author, Bill VanPatten (bvp). He asked fl (Continue Reading)
Just think: George Bush 43 will probably become our most quoted president.
here’s a couple of things to munch on if you believe the teaching of SE to students is simply a matter of setting out and (Continue Reading)
The original work, as far as I know, on this topic is great for nostalgia buffs wanting a return to the fifies: Robert A. Hall, (Continue Reading)
A general treatment of English, incl its history, is the ubiquitous David >Crystal’s The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. > >An easy read but (Continue Reading)
The Grammar Mavens (Steven Pinker’s term) cite rules of English only to denigrate those who “break” them. The rules they refer to are not the (Continue Reading)
This year at ACTFL did more to rally my spirits this last year of my tenure as a foreign language teacher than any except my (Continue Reading)
As I was sorting my picture files out in the garage and thinking about how students will talk and write about the pictures after we (Continue Reading)
My wife and I bought a pig-in-a-poke, tickets to a performance at ASU, but it had to do with the influence of African dance on (Continue Reading)
While I cannot recommend it for everyone, those who want to follow intelligent arguments could do worse than to listen to npr’s Intelligence Squared on (Continue Reading)
At long last I have found a reference to the terror network I think of when our fearless leader talks about terrorists and religious extremists. (Continue Reading)
Recently on one of the language Lists a discussion brewed up over the use of “less? in places where the grammar mavens insist on “fewer’. (Continue Reading)
Recently I posted to the blog some comments about what goes on in my school. I thought it was balanced, but someone kindly pointed out (Continue Reading)