Apr 21, 2020 Classroom Activities, Grammar, Lexis, Opinions Back to School Part Three: lessons of forgetting and laughter They say that learning a foreign language is a good way of avoiding dementia in later life, but with learning Russian I sometimes feel that maybe dementia has already set in! Words taught mere seconds ago can become a blank and I find myself stuck in a loop of asking “What’s that word?” and “How […]
Mar 20, 2020 Classroom Activities, Coursebooks, Grammar, Lexis, Opinions, Pronunciation Back to school Part 2: TomAYto TomARto In my last post, I described two basic routes to learning language as a means of communication. At this point, I should reiterate that what I am talking about here are not routes to any real kind of fully-functional fluency. One of the most profound realisations you have when you start learning a new language […]
Feb 11, 2020 Grammar, Opinions, The state of our profession Back to school: Part One As you may have noticed, we recently wrote a Beginner’s book and I have written a series of posts exploring the ideas behind it. One thing that’s driving this two-man campaign (you can decide for yourself if that means it’s an advertising campaign or a war!) is the commonly-expressed view that lexical approaches are only […]
Jan 5, 2020 Coursebooks, Grammar, Lexis, Opinions A different kind of Beginner-level book 5: Pronunciation Pronunciation: Really? Do I have to? While the bulk of Beginner coursebooks on the market are pretty uniform when it comes to the way they handle grammar and – to some extent – vocabulary, there seems to be little consistency when it comes to pronunciation and what to teach. Headway Beginner doesn’t have any pron […]
Jun 9, 2019 Coursebooks, Grammar, Lexis, Opinions A different kind of Beginner-level book 4: a spiralling syllabus A spiralling syllabus is NOT just about grammar Hopefully, you’ll have read our previous post on a spiral syllabus. In this short post, I want to add that the spiral syllabus doesn’t only apply to grammar. The same principles also apply to vocabulary and ‘functions’ and indeed to whole exchanges. In the case of vocabulary, […]