An American lecturer based in Germany suggested to me that many students participate in an exchange program in order to escape something, and that she wouldn't be surprised if a large percentage of those students suffer from some psychological imbalance....
Motivation - Expressing oneself and the expression of oneself in language learning
A quick exercise
Before I get into the topic, if you are currently learning a language, I would like to invite you to study the next two graphs. I suggest you draw them on a sheet (no need to be too precise!).
Graph 1. Year Trajectory
Look at the...
At a conference late last year I disagreed with a well-known linguist (Lourdes Ortega) about the way a presenter recorded the bilingual status of their respondents. Following a questionnaire they had filled in, the presenter had classed many of them...
It would be difficult to argue against the view that languages has been key in human evolution and an instrument into making large conglomerates of people possible. While defining language would be a very difficult task, one I am not ready to indulge...
The following article was born from a personal interest in how study abroad came about and what was said about it. What follows then is the fruit of fairly extensive, although not comprehensive exploration of the academic literature on the subject...
Un Sac de Billes
1h 50min
Drama
18 January 2017 (France)
Country: France / Canada / Czech Republic
Language: French
I was particularly excited by the film selection in Melbourne's French Film Festival this year as one of my all times favourite...
Have you ever wondered what language actually is? I don't mean distinguishing between a language and a dialect, or pondering whether to call computer programming a language or not. I mean what is this phenomenon we call language?
In the last few...
Boredom And Classroom Students - A Teacher's Perspective
At a time when autodidacticism, or self-learning, is celebrated, I would like to take this opportunity to promote the old-fashion formal classroom, by addressing some of the criticism found in web-based language learning platforms.
Often mentioned,...
LingoHut - A Simple And Effective Language Learning Resource
I was asked a few weeks ago if I'd write something about LingoHut. As Kendal Knettemann, one half of the platform founder told me, it was not to provide LingoHut with some advertising material, but to fairly inform our readership what LingoHut...
While it is becoming rarer to find anyone who doesn’t agree that language should be taught, there remains at least one controversial domain whereby the teaching of a language can leave a bad taste in the mouths of many, the language teaching that...
Book Look - Acquisition of Word Formation Devices in First & Second Languages” (2017)
A review of "Acquisition of Word Formation Devices in First & Second Languages" (2017) by Endri Shqerra. 102 pages. Paperback or kindle
What comes to mind when you start to think about how we learn languages? Most of us think of learning environment,...