Frenchteacher survey

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/NQRZPTN

It's just over a year since frenchteacher.net became a subscription site and I'd like to know a bit more about which sections people are using most and what people might like to see added to the site. I can't promise to respond to all requests, but if there is a pattern to responses, I'll certainly be receptive to new ideas.

One or two people have asked if I could include more model answers, so I have asked about that in the survey.

I have been thinking of putting on some listening resources for a while and have a French friend who might help me with that if there is demand. I am aware that course books do lots of good quality listening, so haven't thus far gone for it. We'll see...

The survey is really short and should take no more than two or three minutes.Select the link above.

By the way, recent additions include an article about today's story that CO2 emissions have exceeded the 400ppm level for the first time in about 4 million years. You'll see that I have a lot of resources on the environment, especially global warming, which is an issue that I obsess about just a bit.

For intermediate level sports fans I have done texts on Gareth Bale and Lionel Messi.

A bientôt.

Comments

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought. ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

12 principles of second language teaching

This is a short, adapted extract from our book The Language Teacher Toolkit . "We could not possibly recommend a single overall method for second language teaching, but the growing body of research we now have points to certain provisional broad principles which might guide teachers. Canadian professors Patsy Lightbown and Nina Spada (2013), after reviewing a number of studies over the years to see whether it is better to just use meaning-based approaches or to include elements of explicit grammar teaching and practice, conclude: Classroom data from a number of studies offer support for the view that form-focused instruction and corrective feedback provided within the context of communicative and content-based programmes are more effective in promoting second language learning than programmes that are limited to a virtually exclusive emphasis on comprehension. As teachers Gianfranco and I would go along with that general view and would like to suggest our own set of g

Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

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