I was a little taken aback the other day in one of my junior high school English classes because the teacher had told the students to work alone on their self-introductions just because he wanted them to finish quickly. Actually I was angry because I said that they should ask each other before they ask …

Languages shouldn’t be learnt alone Read More »

When you are put in charge of teaching English to young children it can often be quite challenging. They need to be constantly entertained and engaged, which means either one really fun task, or lots of little ones are necessary. Any activity that is not the least bit fun will have the children off-task and not learning, so …

More easy activities for the low-level language classroom Read More »

Quite often in the conventional language classroom listening "practice" involves listening to something and writing down answers to questions. In real life when someone is talking to you, you don't sit there and write down what they are saying, you respond by showing in some way or another that you have understood what they have said …

How to get proper listening practice in Read More »

The research may not be very conclusive but it is conclusive on one thing: there is not one single way to learn a language. Of course this comes down to terminology; like what does true success in language learning mean? Does it mean simply being able to be understood, or is it more than that, i.e. …

What you need to learn a second language Part 1 Read More »

Japan is supposedly built by people who would rather run around the bush to get their way rather than simply demand their way. In Japanese companies if the subordinates notice that their boss is wrong, instead of confronting the boss with the facts, they would subtly hint that something is wrong until the boss realises, …

Those who run around and those who cut right through Read More »

The importance of learning vocabulary when studying another language is second to none. It simply must be done for there to be any possibility of success, and in this post I outline one very useful and very effective method for building your vocabulary quickly, but surely. When learning a second language it is important to …

How to benefit the most from reading in an L2 Read More »

Ok, so we've established that the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is the difference between what a learner already knows (their actual development level, developed "retrospectively"(Aljaafreh & Lantolf, 1994, p. 468)) and what they can do when assisted (the ZPD, developed prospectively (ibid)), and it is virtually impossible to discover the novice's ZPD without dialogic …

More on the Zone of Proximal Development Read More »