Job Discussion Forums

[sheeba]

I totally agree longshi.

Nobody really has analysed the real issues. One of the reasons I think is that the ESL (Linguistics or whatever) industry has managed to confuse teaching and learning theory with 'communicative language teaching'. There are not many real theories behind 'communicative language teaching' except Krashen and his ludicrous idea that we learn languages from one storage system inherent in the mind. Why can't we face that we are being led in our actions by people that are still sitting in their studies dreaming up hypotheses about language learning and then having to justify to the public their incoherencies whilst pocketing coin in the process. Krashen and Chomsky are basically taking advantage of mediating knowlege that they've barely thought of or probably care about. Their lack of clarity proves they care less.

And clarity needs to be addressed but still the big bods go to their conferences and talk about task based language learning or social constructivist theories like we've been living a world where these don't exist.They're trying to make things clear but we already know this stuff. Reseach then proves that we already know what we've researched and we've wasted our time so why not conclude or hypothesise 'reseach is a waste of time' ?. Because the issues that are being addressed are all wrong. It's up to you as a teacher to do this on your own because there is no real genuine push to look at the real issues at hand. There is no rationale behind much of applied linguistics because of dreamers who believe we have innate language acquisition devices and time wasters who suggest we possess monitors that are unable to contribute to language learning. What will the next fad be ? How can we damage the industry even more?

[LongShiKong]

Apart from growing up in linguistically/culturally diverse environments, there's even a more fundamental advantage westerners have over our Asian counterparts in learning languages. It's our physical and mental mobility coupled with a wealth of experience (even indirect). Marshall McLuhan considered the term 'translation' in its broadest context in theorizing about technological progress--a sort of psycho-socio stress leading to a translation of experience into new forms. (my summation)
------
Neuro-science has shown that different languages are stored in different parts of the brain.* I assume that's with a bilingual westerner. However, if you think about your worst student, I'll bet their English is stored in the same region as their Chinese. * I saw this in a 3-part BBC documentary called (?) 'Brain Story'
------
Sheeba, I agree, there's much confusion out there. Here's some evidence. The following was posted by the 'highly acclaimed' Longman-published Superkids series author who's also a teacher in Japan and lecturer (of teaching English to kids). It was posted on her own Yahoo! Group for users of her series::