Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

"Another dimension of fluency is the actual speed of sound production. When our articulstors (lips, larynx, palate, etc.) have not mastered the pronunciation of L2 sounds, not only may speech slow down and (sic) but also vocabulary retrieval will be hampered, as memory of words is also related to our association of words with sounds." - not something I've yet noticed, accuracy seems the bigger problem.

"The ruin of the power of Athens had fallen out to the advantage of the oligarchical party, and it has even been suspected that the oligarchs had for many years past deliberately planned to place the city at the mercy of the enemy" - coming to Greek history from Plato, I am struck by how robust Athenian democracy was.

Now, if our students persistently make 'regular' rather than random mistakes, they can end up being 'fossilised' (automatised) and incoporated permanently in their current representation of the language." - permanently current? Overregularisation is part of L1 acquisition too.

"Since language acquisition is a slow and cumulative process, it is useful to find ways to make students feel they are making progress."

"The prisoners who survived the ordeal were put to work in the public prison or sold. Some were rescued by young men who were attracred by their manners [sic]. Others owed mitigation of their lot [to their ability to recite Euripides]" - I don" know whether to marvel at the Greek love of verse, or at the credulity of historians.

"...teaching would be impossible unless pupils were sacred. I've taught scores of American millionairesses how to speak English; the best looking women in the world. I'm seasoned. They might as well be blocks of wood. I might as well be a block of wood..." - interesting metaphor.

"I don't want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady."

"Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby"

"The town of Melos was invested in the summer by land and sea, and surrendered unconditionally in the following winter. All the men of military age were put to death, the other inhabitants were enslaved, and the island was colonised by Athenians." - this is a frequent occurence. For all its cultural sophistication, 5th century Athens was just as brutal as Rome.

"Although it is certainly true that what teach we and the order we teach it in does not correspond with the student's own 'mental representation' of L2 (i.e. research shows that students do not seem to pick up grammar in the order we teach it), the vast majority of teachers in schools...' - This is shockingly complacent, we need at least to acknowledge how profound a problem this is for L2 teaching.

"...the more associations created by the second language learner, the more likely they are to remember it, because each association will have the potential to serve as a language cue" - 'likely', 'potential': can we not be certain about what will cause us to remember?

"Research has demonstrated that the most successful construction of a memory takes place when new content is linked to prior knowledge" - no research cited, but this what my own experience suggests. One of main tasks of a teacher, then, is to connect new knowledge to old.

"With the Lady Jessica and Arrakis, the Bene Gesserit system of sowing implant-legends through the Missionaria Protectiva came to its full fruition" - or as we call them today - fake news.

"Young man, as a Proctor of the Bene Gesserit, I seek the Kwisatz Haderach, the male who can truly become one of us." - gender fluidity as underestimated as biotech.

Striking how the geopolitics of the Athenian Empire resemble those of the British. Venetian?

"...men engaged in trade, like Cleon, the leather-merchant; Eucrates, the rope-seller; Hyperbolus, the lamp maket...These new politicians were for the most part strong imperoalists," - Ben Wilson writes something similar in Heyday

"When you have the classes confidence, then go back to L2 again. It is more important for you to survive and build relationships than lose your credibility with students over an ideological point of language teaching pedagogy" - and if you can't speak their L1?

"The great impediment to action is, in our opinion, not discussion, but the want of that knowledge which is gained by discussion preparatory to action. For we have a peculiar power of thinking before we act and acting too, whereas other men are courageous from ignorance but hesitate upon reflection." - Pericles, funeral Panegyric after Thucydides.

"'The Great Revolt took away a crutch,' she said. It forced human minds to develop. Schools were started to train HUMAN talents." - in 1965, the potential of information technology was obvious, biotechnology not so much. The Bene Gesserit are breeding humans like pedegree dogs.

"The importance of the [Peloponnesian] war is not impaired by the smallness of the states which were involved in it. For in these small states lived the political ideas and institutions which concerned the future development of mankind far more than any movements in barbarous kingdoms, however great their territory" - of Europe, of now, not necessarily of mankind.

Scissors and gluesticks - ELT in the background?

"The second half of the fifth century was an age of technical treatises; oratory and cookery were alike reduced to systems;"

"There is no more significant symptom of the political and social health of the Athenian state in the period of its empire, than the perfect freedom which was accorded to the comic stage..."

"Protagoras, we know, maintained that there are two contrary arguments on every subject, and himself composed two books of 'Antilogies'. In this way he set his pupils to debate, reconciling the opposing views or justifying one against the other." - I've used an ELT book, 'For and Against' in the same way, 2,500 years later.

"[Plato] reserved his attack for the corrupting forces which he considered responsible for the downfall of [Critias et al.] the licence and mob-oratory prevailing under the democracy and the rhetorical teachers who claimed that the art of speaking has nothing to do with moral standards." - this book has transformed my appreciation of Plato.

"Rewritten, upwritten, outwritten Less himself. For he has known genius." - I hate books about writing, but this is new.

"KAIROS, the right time or opportunity, for as Disraeli also knew, 'the opportune in a popular assembly has sometimes more success than the weightiest efgorts of research and reason'

"...a commonplace, the comparision between education and husbandry in which the soil represents the natural capacity of the pupil." - flowerpots? Did I absorb this from Wiggins/Janaway?

Monothesism, pantheism - "On the whole it is better to avoid these labels, which though made up from Greek roots were alien to the Greeks themselves" - perhaps where he should have started this discussion.

"In Plato's eyes the first and greatest crime against religion is not open atheism but the encouragement of supetstition" - was there any public religion in the classical world that wasn't superstition?