Tag: sla
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Zen and (the Art of) English Language Teaching
I will be giving a talk at the Hiroshima JET Orientation on 15 August 2012 entitled Zen and (the Art of) English Language Teaching. It will be about what we can learn from Zen and apply it to teaching English on the JET Programme, in which I was had been a participant. Before I was…
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What has Zen got to do with English language teaching?
Everything. “Revisiting” my master in Zen on YouTube the other day I was compelled to think about what it means to be a language student and how it relates to Zen. It seems to me many of the students I teach unnecessarily limit themselves with a psychological barrier – they believe they will never achieve…
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Learning languages: the importance of motivation, repetition, authenticity, proportion of time
Yesterday’s Hiroshima JALT monthly meet was a good one. Four non-native speakers of English talked about their experience and how they went about learning the language. One point was common to all four speakers: motivation. And three of the speakers had repetition and authentic material use as a commonality. Motivation is ultimately a most factor…
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How many hours do Japanese students have to study in order to master English?
I was told by one of my teachers back in my undergraduate days about twenty years ago that for me to master Japanese it would take me 700 hours of class time. The number now seems to be 2,200 hours. Japanese is a language notoriously difficult to learn for native English speakers because of their…
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