Skip to main content

My five most viewed blogs of 2016

It's gratifying to me that this blog has been read more and more this year with the total number of page views exceeding 1 million in December. Content has ranged from reviews, information and reflections to resources and marketing blogs. The blog has been a continued focus for me, along with frenchteacher.net, The Language Teacher Toolkit, my new soon-to-be-published handbook and the TES units of work co-written with Gianfranco Conti.

The five most read posts of 2016 are listed below.

1. Learning strategies.

This was actually the third in a series of five posts about Learning Strategies, based on material which we could not fit into The Language Teacher Toolkit. This post was shared by the British Council so picked up over 22,000 views.

2. What about natural aptitude for second language learning?

With over 14,000 views, this post looked at the background and history of research into language learning aptitude. All teachers know how much variation there is between pupils, but how much is down to ability, how much sheer hard work? Research into aptitude has become rather neglected, but occasionally surfaces, with some scholars even suggesting a strong genetic element in language learning capability.

3. What teachers are saying about The Language Teacher Toolkit.

This was a marketing blog which listed many of the complimentary reviews Gianfranco and I have received about our handbook. We are delighted that the book has sold over 1500 copies around the world in nine months. If you haven't got it yet, check out the reviews!

4. Three AQA A-level courses compared.

This post combined three individual reviews of new A-level French courses from OUP, Hodder and Steve Glover (online). The two books are a good deal better than the previous crop of A-level courses, while more teachers have been moving to Steve's Attitudes 16 downloadable course. I enjoy reviewing text books and books on language teaching methodology.

5. New GCSE resources on frenchteacher.net.

This one had 4500 views and was just a summary of the resources I had written at that stage in the year for the new GCSE (intermediate) French course. This, along with A-level, was the main focus for the website this year. For GCSE I added my own example exam papers, speaking and translation material.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,
4 comments
Read more

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).
Post a Comment
Read more

12 principles of second language teaching

This is a short, adapted extract from our book The Language Teacher Toolkit . "We could not possibly recommend a single overall method for second language teaching, but the growing body of research we now have points to certain provisional broad principles which might guide teachers. Canadian professors Patsy Lightbown and Nina Spada (2013), after reviewing a number of studies over the years to see whether it is better to just use meaning-based approaches or to include elements of explicit grammar teaching and practice, conclude: Classroom data from a number of studies offer support for the view that form-focused instruction and corrective feedback provided within the context of communicative and content-based programmes are more effective in promoting second language learning than programmes that are limited to a virtually exclusive emphasis on comprehension. As teachers Gianfranco and I would go along with that general view and would like to suggest our own set of g
2 comments
Read more