Automatic Language Growth – a variant of Krashen’s Natural Approach
Jack Taylor, a young teacher of English in Japan and creator and manager of the Japan TPRS forum, alerted me to the work of Dr. J. Marvin Brown who created the Automatic Language Growth (ALG) (earlier called the Listening Approach), a variant of Krashen and Terrell’s Natural Approach. Dr. Brown developed his ideas over many years [...]
7 principles of input-based language-learning
Following the 9 myths, here are the 7 principles, from the Linguist Steve Kaufmann himself: Seven principles of input based language learning. Seven principles of input based language learning. 1) We learn languages by listening, not by speaking. A new language has words and phrases that are strange to us. Before we can learn to [...]
Introducing a great website on teaching English in Japan
Here is another resource site for people interested in TPRS in Japan: Beniko Mason’s website. Prof. Mason promotes, studies, researches and uses Krashen’s theories of language acquisition. On her website is listed some of her publications in this field, including papers on extensive reading, comprehensible input, and so on. Some of her papers are in [...]
Can role-play help fluency?
In The Language Teacher, March/April 2010′s “Readers’ Forum”, Eric Bray writes about role-play in EFL (PDF, login and password required) (the TLT homepage mistakenly attributes the article): Unlike more controlled language learning activities, roleplays [sic] are tasks which fall towards the freer end of the language learning activity continuum discussed by Nunan (2004) and Richards [...]
Dictation redux
Image via Wikipedia A while back, I posted about using dictation in EFL classes. I recently gave dictations in my final exams, and reading the results taught me some further uses for dictation. Students failed to notice how a falling intonation indicated the end of a sentence. I did not announce the punctuation, as I [...]
Academic Writing
Most of my classes are of the “Oral English” type, but I also teach some classes in which students are required to produce academic writing in English. At first, I assumed that my students were getting basic instruction in academic writing in their native language (Japanese) in other classes, e.g. their seminar classes. They probably [...]
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