Job Discussion Forums

[stillnosheep]

Rusmeister, we seem to have wandered a long way in this discussion I suspect that the differences in our practice are less than they seem here and that our main disagreements are a matter of approach and attitude to knowledge in general, not just language and teaching. Of course definitions are sometimes needed, but I don't see why what one cannot or does not define need be impossible to teach. In a similar fashion I disagree that strict lines defining boundaries are always neeed, or indeed useful, or even, at times possible. To borrow from Wittgenstein we can know what light is and what darkness is but nonetheless no strict boundary can be drawn between the two in the case of a lamp shining on an otherwise dark street. One shades into the other.

In the case of conditional expressions, I believe that the simplification of language that is always needed in order to get students started has gone to far and that we as teachers seem to have come to believe out own simplifications and that native speakers really do use mixtures and variations of the standard far more often than we use the '3 forms' beloved of textbooks. But as I said, I suspect that in our practice we display more similarities than might seem obvious from this thread.

Foreign language mastery? I once mastered one to the point that very occasionally native speakers, on first meeting, took me for a native speaker, albeit one with a slighly strange form of speech; funnily enough that was a language I never had a lesson in, althoug I did start with self-tuiton using a very old-fashioned and rule-bound textbook.

[rusmeister]