NOTE: This post is a feature-fest based on a jam-packed conference presentation. Please feel free to skip around! To me, the perfect lesson plan is one that guarantees buy-in by students, requires little to no preparation, is enjoyable for students and teacher, is flexible and repeatable with the same group of students and across levels, […]
What Is Your Favorite Thing To Do?
If you could spend your time doing whatever you wanted, how would you spend it? What if doing that activity somehow also helped you learn a language? Many of our favorite activities can be adjusted or can be incorporated into our schedules in such a way as to enhance language learning. This doesn’t mean they always […]
Indwelling Language and Stephen Krashen at NTPRS 2015
The first day at NTPRS 2015 (this year’s national conference for the system called Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling) has been exhilarating: I’ve enjoyed conversations with teachers and presenters that I had known only through the internet or by fame and had been eager to meet in person, and have been pleasantly surprised to hear that I have been […]
Balancing Research and Experience
If you’ve ever tried to compile a bibliography of sources on issues in language teaching and learning—issues such as the roles of input and output, error correction, age of onset (when someone starts learning a language), explicit instruction, social and emotional factors, etc.—then you’ve noticed at least one thing: You can find an article or […]
You can’t learn when you’re distracted–a note from London
It’s the middle of the night in London, where I’m spending the week in a cute little flat in Soho. Today my wife and I, with a group of friends, enjoyed an outing to Stratford and, though I never tire of driving through the English countryside, I decided–perhaps inspired by glimpsing Cicero and Caffe Nero side by […]
Grammar Is Not a Skill, or, What Does It Really Mean to Know a Language?
I’m thrilled to share my first contribution to the reinvented Musicuentos Black Box Podcast, a collection of resources created to form a bridge between Second Language Acquisition research and everyday practice. We hope that, whether you are a teacher or a learner, this new video series will provide you with both information and inspiration! This episode, […]
An Old Friend and a New
Like you, I have many gurus, mentors, and models to whom I look up in my language teaching and learning, and I’m always excited to discover a new one. Today I want to share with you one person whose common-sense approach I have long found refreshing and worth imitating, and another of whose expertise I recently learned. […]
Looking backward and forward
It’s usually in January that we talk about that month’s namesake Janus, the Roman god who peers simultaneously into the past and into the future. Myself, I’m most drawn to that split gaze around the end of the academic year, when the events of this one are still fresh and the possibilities of the next burn bright. Whether you’re […]
Do What You Feel Like
“Do what you feel like” can be devastating moral advice, but for language-learning that doesn’t have an impending deadline, it’s a great way to maximize joy and success. Here’s what I mean: This morning I felt like reading young adult fantasy fiction in French. Fortunately, I had sitting by my bed a copy of Harry Potter à l’école des sorciers […]
Six Months of Simple Content
Having received a number of requests recently for an overview of things like personal reading habits, teacher-improvement practices, networking tips, and other topics, I thought it might be useful–right around the six-month birthday of indwellinglanguage.com–to provide a one-stop overview of content dealing with each topic. The list below does not include all the articles and media that […]