Job Discussion Forums

[Sashadroogie]

It's a well-known FACT that empty vodka bottles make most noise. Perfect for ALM classrooms and unusual trajectories.



Hic!

Hic!

[Teacher in Rome]

Thanks for the Eddie Izzard link, Sasha.

For any of us learning French in that generation, he brings it all back. The language lab. The boredom. Those horrible books. The complete pointlessness of what we "learnt".

Fortunately, my school abandoned the audio method a couple of years after I started secondary school. It was only then that I got really interested in French - and good enough to study it for my degree.

Jetgirly: I think you should show that youtube link to your school!

[LongShiKong]

[zactherat]

@teacher in rome
you actually just taught me the 'they' conjugation in French - I never knew that before ~

long live solid structure!


@Sashadroogie
your alcoholic jokes are not really that funny.


Are we allowed to make jokes about other drug addictions?

because my cousin in Florida is really into bathing salts..
so much so that he'd bite off _______ to spite _______.

[Sashadroogie]

Who says they are jokes?

[spiral78]

[LongShiKong]

[Mia Xanthi]

I have as thorough a background in SLA as you are ever going to find. Having studied 2nd language acquisition for years and having taught ESL/EFL for even more years, I am throughly convinced that a solid audio lingual program is the perfect way to start true beginners in a second language. A month or two of drill and kill activates automaticity in the second language, and provides just enough instant access to basic structures to allow students to begin communicative learning. A few months of communicative learning can then lead to productive content-based learning. That is my vision of the perfect program...a healthy combination of approaches that accomplish different goals as students progress. So, what do you think?

[LongShiKong]

Yep. Certain (false) beginners (usually the ones who also need a lot of pronunciation work) need far more of this than others--the challenge of course with this type of learner is inevitably to keep them mindful otherwise it becomes 'demeaning' practice. Those who condemn student-centered teaching and the 'CELTA method' obviously recognize its value.

[Mia Xanthi]

I had 3 years of audio lingual instruction in high school ((back in the dark ages, mind you) an I never once felt demeaned by it. At the time, it struck me as a sensible way to teach a one-hour foreign language class. The dialogues were silly and it was hard to keep a straight face at times, but in the end I learned a lot. When I finally visited a country where I had to communicate in the foreign language, I found I had all the necessary resources at hand. It made communication less humiliating because I had so many "language chunks" at my disposal. I think I was able to respond faster andspeak with greater courage because of my years of behaviorist- inspired audio lingual training. I am not sure that a true beginner who started with a communicative approach would have felt so well- prepared and confident in conversation.

[LongShiKong]