The direct method of teaching was a rebellion against the somber and book-intensive grammar-translation method of the previous era. The pendulum swung hard away from verb conjugations and towards speaking/listening skills. Rather than having students pore over volumes of ancient Latin texts, this teaching method incorporated lots of visual aids, role-playing activities, and pictures. Another major change was in [...]
Some school lessons give students a sneaking suspicion that they're being forced to learn something they won't need in real life - long division, memorizing the periodic table, writing in cursive, etc. Learning how to write an argumentative essay, however, will pay dividends down the road. Strictly speaking, an argumentative essay is "a piece of writing that uses logical [...]
Most language learning systems address four basic skills โ reading, writing, listening, and speaking. The grammar-translation method focuses solely on the first two, largely ignoring listening and speaking. This method has been around since the days of Ancient Greece and Rome, then experienced a bit of a resurgence in the early 1900s. Since then, it has fallen out of [...]
A joke really only has two parts โ the set-up (I'm on the new whiskey dietโฆ) and the punchline (I've lost three days already). The punchline is of course the funny bit and comes at the end, though for a longer joke, smaller humorous parts, known as jab lines, can be sprinkled in. If you've ever heard an unfunny joke, [...]
Language is one of our worldโs most powerful tools, and throughout history, governments and large organizations have used different forms of language planning as a way to control that power. In a broad sense, language planning is an organized effort by a major entity to change a societyโs language. These efforts can be, and usually are, done for the [...]
As students, many of us took part in some type of foreign language instruction at school, and depending on your age and country, this could have ranged from incomprehensible teacher lectures to singing songs, to intense grammar drilling. In the world of education, second language acquisition philosophies and practices change at a rapid clip, and the new breakthrough methodology [...]
From the moment we learn to control our mouths, lungs, and vocal cords as infants, we yearn to speak. As babies, we babble and attempt to copy words, and with no formal instruction at all, we can typically grasp the basics of speaking in under a year and begin to communicate. Neurolinguists have shown that our brainโs superior temporal [...]
The company of your dreams emails you to set up an online interview. Itโs going to be held in a foreign language, but thatโs okay. You've spent your entire life studying, getting job experience, and preparing for this moment that will give you financial freedom, a new career trajectory, and an adventure in a new land. And now youโre [...]
Picture this scenario: A young German executive from a semiconductor manufacturer is sent to pitch a proposal to a high-level business partner in Japan. The German executive knows his companyโs products are superior, and he spends days preparing different documents, case studies, graphs, etc. as evidence. At the meeting he gives these mountains of handouts to the Japanese businessman, [...]
