Gringolandians, those living in Gringo enclaves, live such isolated and bizarrely separate lives from the Mexicans in the same town that they have on more than one occasion called me an absolute liar for the things I've reported happening in the Mexican city where I live.
One thing with which they take particular exception is what [...]
Though a conservative, I read liberal points of view. I do so for two reasons.
One, their views help me refine my own.
The second reason is that I owe it to "the other side" to be able to fairly and accurately characterize their position on an issue with which I take exception. Not to do so [...]
In second language acquisition research conducted in 1974-75, 1980 and 1987, it was postulated that the acquisition of grammatical forms followed a natural and predictable order. How this happens is contingent upon multiple factors. The learner's age and the learner's circumstances seemed not to be a significant influence on this natural order. Dr. Krashen makes [...]
The chief problem for most Americans who want to learn Spanish but who don't succeed is the Affective Factor. Plainly put, this means the emotional issues; that is, adults become freaked out at the thought. The fear of getting put on the spot and embarrassed is just too much to bear.
I've talked to plenty monolingual [...]
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 way in which adult Africans, and I believe many of the adults I've met in the resort areas of Mexico, have developed a high degree of spoken fluency is the same way in which we learned our native tongue as children - Passive Listening. If ever there was a "natural way" to learn a [...]
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, [...]
"Foreign language learning is not something that happens overnight; it takes a commitment of time and money. U.S. schools compound the problem by waiting too long to start foreign language instruction. According to ACTFL Professional Programs Director Elvira Swender, U.S. students often start learning foreign languages at puberty, "an age at which their brains are [...]
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 [...]