18 jan 2015

by | in Classroom Experiences, Language Acquisition, Lesson Ideas, Reflections about Education, Skills, Teacher Development

  This month's post is about different ways of learning, or learning styles, as some authors put it. It's also about why I believe they exist even when we totally ignore their existence. It is a controversial issue for many teachers, who have mixed feelings about it. Do Learning Styles really exist?  Are they just a myth? Most authors would agree that there is very little evidence of their existence, but when it comes to teaching, authors firmly believe that there's no 'right' or 'wrong' and that there are...

18 dez 2014

by | in Classroom Experiences, Language Acquisition, Teacher Development, Vocabulary

                1. Une Tomate Rouge Less than a month ago I decided to take up French and I am already being faced with big challenges: I had assumed that languages close to your own in the language tree should not be too hard to learn, so I picked French since  both languages evolved from spoken Latin. However, less than a month into it and I have already changed my mind completely. Its phonological system is a nightmare; the /s/ at the end of words never made it into the spoken...

14 abr 2014

by | in Teacher Development

Think of a baby. What is it you associate with it most - the smell? The sound of the baby crying? Perhaps you think about how it feels to hold a baby, or even just what it looks like? The chances are that most people reading this (assuming there's more than one!) will have answered that question differently, since it's intuitive to think that we all perceive and interact with the world around us in different ways. ...