The audio-lingual method focuses on speaking with the elegance and fluidity of a native speaker, and aims to accomplish this through repetition and concentrated practice. It gained prominence in the '50s and '60s, and is known as the "Army method" because of its implementation by the US Army during WWII. Its strict focus on precise communication made it ideal [...]
International airports are multilingual and multicultural places by nature, but no matter where you are in the world, you're likely to hear English inside a plane. But this goes past the familiar airline phrases – "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking" and "The seatbelt sign is on," and goes more specifically into the plane's cockpit. All pilots [...]
The direct method of teaching was a rebellion against the somber and book-intensive grammar-translation method of the previous era. The pendulum swung hard away from verb conjugations and towards speaking/listening skills. Rather than having students pore over volumes of ancient Latin texts, this teaching method incorporated lots of visual aids, role-playing activities, and pictures. Another major change was in [...]
Some school lessons give students a sneaking suspicion that they're being forced to learn something they won't need in real life - long division, memorizing the periodic table, writing in cursive, etc. Learning how to write an argumentative essay, however, will pay dividends down the road. Strictly speaking, an argumentative essay is "a piece of writing that uses logical [...]
Most language learning systems address four basic skills – reading, writing, listening, and speaking. The grammar-translation method focuses solely on the first two, largely ignoring listening and speaking. This method has been around since the days of Ancient Greece and Rome, then experienced a bit of a resurgence in the early 1900s. Since then, it has fallen out of [...]
A joke really only has two parts – the set-up (I'm on the new whiskey diet…) and the punchline (I've lost three days already). The punchline is of course the funny bit and comes at the end, though for a longer joke, smaller humorous parts, known as jab lines, can be sprinkled in. If you've ever heard an unfunny [...]
Food is a subject nearly everyone holds dear, but expressing our love of food in different languages is not so easy. Most people are proud of a particular food or dish from their culture, and eager to share it with a visitor. Similarly, most of us are excited to sample exotic new dishes or even try our hand at [...]
As students, many of us took part in some type of foreign language instruction at school, and depending on your age and country, this could have ranged from incomprehensible teacher lectures to singing songs, to intense grammar drilling. In the world of education, second language acquisition philosophies and practices change at a rapid clip, and the new breakthrough methodology [...]
From the moment we learn to control our mouths, lungs, and vocal cords as infants, we yearn to speak. As babies, we babble and attempt to copy words, and with no formal instruction at all, we can typically grasp the basics of speaking in under a year and begin to communicate. Neurolinguists have shown that our brain’s superior temporal [...]
One of modern civilization’s most commonly used tools sits just beneath our fingertips, as our keyboards provide us with an arsenal of approximately 80 numbers, letters, and commands, all ready to do our bidding. For those of us who utilize the Roman alphabet (approximately 70% of all major languages), we press these keys in various combinations and assemble the [...]
