Bryan Murphy's Blog - Posts Tagged "tefl"
Murphy's Laws
HOW NOT TO LEARN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE
In Ten Easy Steps
Step 6. Limit input
In addition to what you learned in Step 5, avoid radio and TV in the target language.
The Internet and cable or satellite TV can keep you informed and entertained in your own language.
If you make the mistake of watching your favourite programmes dubbed into the local language, your knowledge of programmme format will make situations easy to predict; this will help you to guess the meaning of the language, which, unfortunately, might cause you to learn some of it.
Be canny: for instance, English football fans in Thailand could watch live Premiership matches on Indonesian TV, so that the language and language awareness they pick up would not be Thai.
Read a good deal, but only in your own language. Bangkok, astonishingly, has three English-language daily newspapers, as well as English-language libraries and bookshops.
Talk shop while socialising. This will prevent the people you talk to from giving you information about the target language and culture.
If you must talk about such things, try and do it only with people whose language awareness is low.
Try to hang out with people who, if they are aware of the local culture, do not like it.
This will further help to keep your integrative motivation usefully low, always providing you can stand such people.
In Ten Easy Steps
Step 6. Limit input
In addition to what you learned in Step 5, avoid radio and TV in the target language.
The Internet and cable or satellite TV can keep you informed and entertained in your own language.
If you make the mistake of watching your favourite programmes dubbed into the local language, your knowledge of programmme format will make situations easy to predict; this will help you to guess the meaning of the language, which, unfortunately, might cause you to learn some of it.
Be canny: for instance, English football fans in Thailand could watch live Premiership matches on Indonesian TV, so that the language and language awareness they pick up would not be Thai.
Read a good deal, but only in your own language. Bangkok, astonishingly, has three English-language daily newspapers, as well as English-language libraries and bookshops.
Talk shop while socialising. This will prevent the people you talk to from giving you information about the target language and culture.
If you must talk about such things, try and do it only with people whose language awareness is low.
Try to hang out with people who, if they are aware of the local culture, do not like it.
This will further help to keep your integrative motivation usefully low, always providing you can stand such people.
Life in the Slow Lane.
I have just added another language-learning case study to my website. A piece of reality among all the fiction.
http://www.bryanmurphy.eu/Case_study_...
http://www.bryanmurphy.eu/Case_study_...
