7 hypotheses that may account for some adult students’ perplexing lack of progress in their language learning. This post offers no solutions, of course. Only reflections and further questions.
Random musings
The hazy line between grammar & lexis
This post is a short anecdotal account of two lessons I taught in 2002.
Why on earth, you must be wondering, would I have any sort of recollection of two lessons I taught nearly ten years ago.
It so happens that those two lessons were very significant because they helped me to finally make sense of something I’d read about but couldn’t fully grasp. Not until then, anyway.
Gem of a book
December’s intuition post took me on a long and unintended trip down my own language-learning memory lane and brought back all sorts of recollections of the processes I went through as a language learner. Here’s a thought that’s been nagging at me over the past month:
How do I know the English I know today? How did I build up my own linguistic knowledge / competence / intuition?
ESL textbooks – the current orthodoxy
What do modern EFL/ESL textbooks look like?
This is a post I wrote before I became a full time author, back in 2011.
Over the past few months I’ve analyzed dozens of EFL / ESL textbooks (I’m using the terms interchangeably) put out by the mainstream publishing houses. For better and for worse, all these EFL / ESL textbooks have more similarities than differences, which means that it’s becoming increasingly harder to choose title A over title B. Here’s a summary of what I’ve found so far: