no translation
March 23, 2018
What do you do when you’re entering a new classroom, but this time, you have to leave it the way you found it, every single week? Well, you ask #langchat, of course. Two and a half years ago I took to Twitter to get ideas from my amazing #langchat PLN could come up. I was re-entering the […]
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July 20, 2016
When I graduated from my master’s program in Linguistics with an emphasis on Second Language Acquisition, I suffered from a fundamental misunderstanding. I thought that there was a consensus on the general principles guiding how language acquisition works, what that means the second time around, and what that understanding ought to mean for the classroom […]
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April 5, 2016
This post was authored by Justin Slocum Bailey and posted on Indwelling Language in response to my invitation for conversation on the learning vs. acquisition dichotomy, particularly in the context of translation, in the post Better acquisition by altering (not eliminating) translation.” (Finally! Someone is willing to talk about this!) Justin and Indwelling Language co-sponsor […]
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March 22, 2016
I think I’ve come to the end of the acquisition vs. learning distinction for the purposes of language learning in a classroom. Rewind. When I first started investigating second language acquisition research, I was blown away by what I learned about how people really learn languages. It revolutionized my classroom. It brought me to incorporate […]
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September 16, 2014
happy birthday, Musicuentos Whew, I’ve been blogging a long time. My blogging birthday passed unnoticed but Musicuentos turned SIX on the first of this month! A lot has changed in six years. My teaching scaled back. My blogging scaled up. A kid came… and another… and another. Whenever people talk about all that’s changed, the […]
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July 10, 2013
Back when I used to ask for translation at the end of every test, I’d comb through that chapter’s vocabulary list to come up with sentences that would test the maximum number of words and target features. Like this gem: I saw a turtle with two heads in the park with my tall friend and […]
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December 24, 2010
It doesn’t take a teacher to realize that training students to translate doesn’t produce proficiency. If you want to look into the SLA research behind why translation slows language processing so much (and if you are a teacher, you owe it to yourself to get this and let it revolutionize your methodology), start with this […]
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April 13, 2010
My baby’s been occupying a whole lot of my time lately, draining the life from my blogging and twittering, but in the grand scheme of priorities, she’s above my blog, sorry. 😉 But now that potty training is going more smoothly I’ll make a concerted effort to get back into things. Way too long ago […]
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February 19, 2009
A product I love
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EMC Paradigm has a product out called SymTalk. The part I use is a set of 256 symbol cards that are magnetic. (I requested a magnetic board specifically to use this and my school got me both, thank you Whitefield!) The cards illustrate various concepts and words without translation. On mine, the word is there […]
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February 9, 2009
Cause and effect
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A few thoughts on what we shouldn’t do, in my opinion: If you don’t want your students to translate in their heads when they speak… DON’T include translation in your assessment. EVER. Real translation/interpretation is a very advanced skill and will come with time anyway. If you don’t want your students to run through a […]
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November 21, 2008
Grammar learning vs. acquisition
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My 38 Spanish 1 darlings just turned in a stack of projects–they had to describe and illustrate five family members, at least one of them a plural set, at least one outside their immediate family. They had to tell me 1) what their name was, 2) ¿cómo es?, and 3) ¿cómo está? We worked on […]
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November 21, 2008
Forced to give grammar tests?
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Diane from foreignlanguagefun.com left me this comment on my previous post: “I teach using immersion, stories, TPR, music . . . but then I have to give common assessments. Although they are proficiency-based, there is a lot of isolated grammar, etc. I’m fascinated by the “no warning” tests. Of course, it makes perfect sense and […]
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