[Recaps can help ease tension contours after intense learning.]
[Recaps can help ease tension contours after intense learning.]
[If you teach well, people might pay you to help them with things you’re skilled at, even without expertise.]
[Putting people in a group or course would yield better outcomes when they have been vetted to have similar needs that can be addressed by your offering. The transactional ‘buy and enroll’ misses this opportunity.]
[Living documentation that everyone can access. Many people have talked about doing it, but you actually do it in a relational way. Nice reminder of the beauty created through that process. No logic or reason behind it, other than connection, recognizing that something cool is happening and doing it.]
Poorly dressed in other folks’ old clothes, with a dog and a noisy borrowed bicycle, I’d see half the eyes in the room wish they hadn’t come the moment they realised that it was me giving the workshop. ’this is the guy?!’. Some would quickly look away as if to hide the way their faces openly displayed their shock. I quickly learnt to play off of that, and to enjoy it too; it was the first tension contour to resolve! Knowing that I would resolve that tension, I could enjoy it, a little like sitting in front of a big cake you know you are about to eat, and waiting a little!
[Problematic learners can become observers. Problematic rapports in one-on-one might work out better in a worokshop setting, or in an audio course. Terminating a relationship with the student can still maintain their engagement with the method.]
[Bear with difficult learners as long as they help illuminate deficiencies in your method. Try to convince them to play ball, but ultimately leave the choice with them.]
[Explaining etymology can help mask repetition.]
[Moving at the speed of trust.]
[Teaching a language vertically is quickly tedious. Nobody makes a sentence from only prepositions. Better to tie together various concepts to enable creating simple expressions.]
[Teach common words after the necessary knowledge to understand them, not at the beginning.]
As language methods often completely ignore the language of instruction, they tend to have an irritating habit of describing absolutely everything a language does. Learners are often forced to spend too much time trying to make heads or tails of grammatical descriptions provided to them for a new language, without ever realising that the target language functions in the same way as the base language, or indeed realising it when it’s too late and the knowledge can do little to spare the learner any effort. What’s worse, is that superfluous descriptions run the risk of becoming mental debris that the learner is unsure how to apply. They may lurk in the shadows and raise their ugly heads later on, interfering with other thought processes (often in fascinating ways, mind!).
In short, we don’t need to describe everything the target language does, and what should remain unsaid will have much to do with the structure of the language of instruction. To describe certain things in the target language which are indeed the same in the base language (without a particular reason for doing so) would serve to make our learner feel less in control than they would have with less information. We will avoid burdening our learners with irrelevant observations they’re not sure what to do with, and in this way we also cue that what we do tell our learners is important.
[We often already know, without realizing that we know.]
When it comes to importing vocabulary, we are almost always using the vocabulary for something other than learning a word. When Complete Spanish opens with -al words, it is not so we can learn legal, normal and metal, but so that we can begin dissecting what vowels sound and look like in Spanish, whilst raising the learner’s consciousness of word stress, too. In the same course, when we access verbs through the pattern ‘cancelation - cancelar, we do so to highlight the infinitive and its function, to then begin establishing the infinitive as a launchpad for building other tenses. The vocabulary conversion itself is secondary to these goals. Our learner will be taken aback by all the free words, of course, but our own focus as writers is elsewhere!
[Languages don’t exist: there are only dialects, and some of those get promoted as a vehicle for national purposes, which makes it a political event.]
[They only know what we tell them when we tell it to them.]
[Often what looks like one concept to someone with experience is really several concepts to a beginner. Make a list of all the elements involved and there will usually be one that can be learned in isolation.]
[The learner should rarely feel like something is missing. The teacher presents one idea at a time, and the learner tries to apply it feeling complete and resolved.]
[Maintain an optimum cognitive load normally and increase or decrease tension deliberately to create contours of peaks and valleys so that the experience feels dynamic and engaging.]
I have taken few steps to simplify its content, deeming any simplification a complication in waiting.
Está rojo is what we might say when referring to the state of a glowing hot piece of metal, while es rojo, as a characteristic, would be used to describe a painted piece of metal.
it is this thought that we must transcribe into our new language, rather than the base language itself.