As its name suggests, Community Language Learning (CLL) is all about fostering a sense of community within the classroom and providing a low-stress environment in which language students can learn and grow. The learners have a great deal of autonomy and in fact decide what they want to learn in each class, with the teacher serving more as a [...]
Nearly every product that reaches our hands these days has already been on an impressive journey around the world. 97% of our clothes are produced abroad, typically in garment factories like those of H&M in Asia or Nike in Brazil. The automobiles made by American companies like Tesla or GM all have parts that originated in countries like China, [...]
Sometimes there is just the perfect word or phrase for a situation. The wittiest of us seem to effortlessly come up with these in real life. Authors and screenwriters are in constant pursuit of them. But when just the right thing is said at the right time, audiences simply know it, and ultimately remember and cherish those words. Such [...]
An old teaching adage says that no matter what the activity, a student can only pay attention for as many minutes as they are years old. For example, seven-year-olds can pay attention to a single classroom task or exercise for approximately seven minutes. When those seven minutes are up, boredom sets in, their attention drifts, and they start planning [...]
The Remarkable Reality of Awake Brain Surgery Imagine answering questions in one of the five languages you are fluent in or playing your guitar while undergoing brain surgery. As you provide the Armenian word for “puppy” or strum out the tune to a well known pop song, a team of surgeons is meticulously mapping out your brain functions. No, [...]
The debate over what is a language and what is a dialect may seem like a linguistic issue best suited for the halls of academia, but the distinction actually has far-reaching real-world implications that can affect the welfare of millions of people worldwide. Anything as fluid and nebulous as language is difficult to classify, and linguists, researchers, and politicians [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
“What’s in a name?” Shakespeare’s Juliet famously asked, and the answer depends on what culture you are talking about and what language you are speaking. Our names are uniquely personal and individual identifiers, yet they often represent the lives, aspirations and beliefs of an incredibly large group of people. In some cultures, names are steeped in tradition and passed [...]
