Most folks, when they set out to study a new language, begin by enrolling in Spanish I at their local Junior College. This is not the way to begin. In fact, the formal learning about the language in a course at the JuCo is about 5 years away from where you are at if you've [...]
To maximize our brain's ability to store visual and auditory impressions in the target language, we must constantly, each day, create an atmosphere in which we are hearing and seeing the language we seek to acquire in an immersion situation. This is not only possible to do in a country in which the target language [...]
The place most worth considering where instruction in how to learn a second language abounds just might surprise you. Africa is the place where more people are multilingual than anywhere else in the world. Thousands of her people speak multiple dialects, different languages in which they conduct all manner of business, multiple native tribal languages, [...]
A most bizarre philosophy of education called "Discovery Learning," based partly on the educational ideas of Rousseau, Pestalozzi and Dewey, led to The Silent Way Method of Second Language acquisition. It also enjoyed the support of psycho-babblists (psychologists) Piaget, Bruner, and Papert. Seymour Papert said,
"You can't teach people everything they need to know. The best [...]
My purpose in this series (which I failed to make clear, apparently, from the beginning) has been to do two things. One is to show the progression of second language acquisition instruction in its historical development through 350-word articles. The second is see who is still using these methods, if any are using them at [...]
Dr. Stephen Krashen's foundational principle in his theory of Second Language Acquisition is called "The Acquisition-Learning hypothesis." In this idea, a distinction is made in that wonderfully exciting and gaiety-galore world of linguistics and language pedagogy between learning a language and acquiring it.
"The acquired system" is the means through which spoken fluency is acquired.
I can [...]
Georgi Lozanov, a Bulgarian psychologist, introduced what he undoubtedly thought an original and brilliant premise: "... students naturally set up psychological barriers to learning - based on fears that they will be unable to perform and are limited in terms of their ability to learn."
Anyone who has ever taught American Junior High school could have [...]
In the field of second language acquisition, Stephen Krashen, Ph.D, is a name that rises above the academic din that usually begins when the subject of Language Acquisition versus Language Learning is brought up. The noise becomes even more deafening when someone, such as myself, would dare to report how the theories of Dr. Krashen [...]
Dr. Krashen explains that this idea, The Monitor Hypothesis, shows how language learning (grammar) affects language acquisition. This is, according to Krashen, the useful outcome of learning grammar. It acts as a "monitor" of spoken language. Krashen postulates that this monitor brings refinement and correctness to speech. It acts to correct errors in speaking the [...]
Going to the host country of the target language has always taken on a sort of mythical quality. It has been believed that you could not learn a foreign language unless you went to the country associated with the target language and engaged in something called Total Immersion.
Total Immersion is NOT a protracted amount of [...]