Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"It is hard to swear when sex is not dirty and blasphemy does not exist" - modern British English?

"...he felt that sense of being necessary which is a burden and reward of parenthood" - probably why being the parent of teenagers is so unrewarding

"People take the dangerous, hard jobs because they take pride in doing them..." - Well, a few do. The history of Communism suggests not enough do.

Privacy, in fact, was almost as desirable for physics as it was for sex.

"It took me several years to learn Pravic" - Not a Chomskyite then.

"Content-based instruction...creates a genuine need to communicate, motivating students to acquire language by understanding the content" - assuming they are motivated to understand the content.

"If you are fortunate enough to have a native speaker language assistant, they can play a really effective role in talking about culture from deep personal experience" - Aha! Our true role delineated.

"Most teachers have personal knowledge and experience they want to share with classes and, particularly with younger classes, this is better done in L1" - the native speaking secondary school teacher really does operate in their paradigm, neither ELT not MFL.

"But on paper, too, we want students to try out new language while making every effort to check accuracy using dictionaries and grammars." - hmmm, I think dictionaries and grammars a leading cause of inaccuracy.

"Students may even benefit from a general introduction to film-making, looking at the history of film, directorial techniques, types of short, types of film, and roles in the film-making business..." - very tempting

"...Several studies have shown that [Indirect Error Correction] is not significantly more effective than DEC or even than no correction at all." - fascinating, like the whole chapter on Assessment, Feedback and Marking, but short of references.

"With weaker students, if the work is riddled with mistakes, then you may choose to correct selectively, probably focusing on one important area..."

"a good multi-choice question should have the aim of allowing 70-80% of students get the answer right" - an attempt to quantify the zone of proximal development? Where's the research?

"An example of a mismatch between teaching and assessment would be if a test requires students to infer meaning from context with unfamiliar words: this assess the language learned during a unit, but compensation strategies..." - seems more of mismatch between teaching and language learning to me, they should be taught how to compensate for their language knowledge.

"Paradise is for those who make Paradise. He did not belong. He was a frontiersman, one of a breed who had denied their past, their history." - is this going to be a defence of Conservatism?

"...[the Urrasti] often used the word "higher" as a synonym for better in their writings, where an Anarresti would use "more central"" - another poke in the eye for Metaphors we live by

"...presenting inaccurate models is contentious..." - I have found, that I am aware of the error, I am more likely to remember the correct form.

"engaging students in the semantic analysis of an L2 word or phrase...is more likely to result in learnin..." - i.e. Crossword puzzles are educationally useful.

"Teaching is a bit like gardening..."

Girls v. Boys in the language classroom; not something I remember being discussed in ELT literature, but a daily issue in the MFL classroom.

"The factor that seems to correlate most negatively with language aptitude is neuroticism, owing to the high levels of anxiety a neurotic person experiences" - psychotherapy an intrinsic part of language teaching?

Showing a picture rather a word 'means that students are less likely to mispronounce words, especially in a language like French where the sound to spelling correspondence is poor." - and in a language like Hungarian, which is phonetically spelled?

"The aim of this is to recycle the language learned so far but to also focus on developing fluency, i.e. fast retrieval from long term memory under time constraints" - and 'speed training' has an effect on fluency?

""You cannot teach by eliciting what is not there, and the best way of making sure that new language is acquired for later extensive use is, very precisely, to give learner's other people's language...and to enable them to make it their own as they use it for personal and creative purposes." - Michael Swann.

"get students to quickly pick out where figures are mentioned, and get them to note the significance of the figure" - I have always been mystified by the role of skim reading or reading for gist in language teaching. Skimming is an advanced reading technique, and requires a lot of experience with a language to be done usefully. This idea at least gives the learner something to find.

"you could get students to guess which points might be covered in the text."

May have found my reading level in Hungarian!

"Such was the little exclusive community which Aristotle designed, while his [Alexander] was setting in motion schemes for world wide commerce, shattering the barriers which sundered nation from nation, building an empire which should include millions, founding cities composed of men of divers races, hewing his way through a maze of new political problems which were beyond Aristotle's horizon."

Re: Introduction of a property restriction for enfranchisement in Athens. I assumed that the distinction between 'citizen' and 'slave' was a de facto property restriction. There is not enough discussion of these topics in this history.

"...there was nothing offensive or outlandish to Greek ear in predicating godhood of revered sovereign or master" - so Augustus was just introducing a Greek custom to the Roman world, when he deified Caesar?