23 Things

The RSS reader is wonderful, but it is also overwhelming. I currently have 10 feeds in my Google reader, but I feel frustrated by the fact that I do not have enough time to do more than skim through the titles of most of the blogs. I did subscribe to a couple of news feed that I have enjoyed quite a bit (NY times movies and Le Monde).

I did find a post that I enjoyed very much by Juergen Kurtz at Foreign Language Education in the 21st Century. The title of the post is “For learners, the Mother Tongue is the Mother of all Languages”. The author has compiled a lot of anecdotal evidence to support the theory that language learning cannot take place without some use of the Mother Tongue.
“We must be ready to fight a war on two fronts: against the teacher who conveniently lapses into the MT, which he shares with his pupils, simply because he is not fluent and flexible enough in the language he teaches; and against the native speaker with little or no command of his pupils’ MT. Both groups of teachers are unlikely to know effective well-crafted bilingual techniques.”
I started using the TPRS method with my students two years ago, and I have come to the conclusion the most important element of language learning is to expose students to comprehensible input. The evidence presented in this post supports this theory.