currentiop.blogg.se

This approach reflects a school’s laziness and willingness to hire monolingual teachers, not the result of their search for the ideal method.Ģ. Judge materials before you judge teachers, and no matter what, do not begin with classes or texts that solely use the target language (e.g., Spanish textbooks in Spanish). I don’t sit in on classes or otherwise consider a school until I’ve reviewed both hand-out materials and text books.

It is the material that will restrict or elevate the teacher, and a good teacher forced to follow bad material will hinder, not hasten, learning progress. Teachers are merely conduits for the material and sequencing.īy analogy, it is better to have a decent cook with excellent easy-to-follow recipe than a great cook with terrible recipe. Teachers are viewed as saviors when materials are actually the determining factor. This is one of several articles planned as supplements to the original “How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour.” This piece focuses on acquisition of new material for reactivating “forgotten” languages and vocab, I recommend also reading “How to Resurrect Your High School Spanish… or Any Language.”įrom the academic environments of Princeton University (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian) and the Middlebury Language Schools (Japanese), to the disappointing results observed as a curriculum designer at Berlitz International (Japanese, English), I have sought for more than 10 years to answer a simple question: why do most language classes simply not work?Īfter testing the waters with more than 20 languages and achieving conversational and written fluency in 6, I have identified several cardinal sins that, when fixed, can easily cut the time to fluency by 50-80%…ġ.