In Case You Missed It: College Students “Don’t Have Time” to Read, Researchers Claim Do ELLs Need More Grammar and Spelling Instruction? Quick Takes: A Map of Language Diversity – Shows the areas on Earth where the most languages are spoken: “The main locations of each entry from the database were used to calculate the […]
This Week In Language Education (June 23, 2017)
It’s been a slow week, so just a few links: Why You Should Sit Next to a Crazy Person at Starbucks – Researchers found that hearing “meaningful irrelevant speech” in the background caused Chinese readers to re-read words more often than when hearing “meaningless irrelevant speech.” Who knew there were classifications for “irrelevant speech”? New Journal […]
This Week In Language Education (June 16, 2017)
We’ll try doing This Week In Language Education a bit differently from now on. I find it more useful to post reviews and observations throughout the week rather than in one post, so I’ll use this weekly post for very short comments and quick takes/links that may be of interest. What is “Translanguaging”? I have come […]
This Week In Language Education – May 19, 2017
This Week In Language Education (May 12, 2017)
Can Talking to Your iPad Improve Your German? Schenker and Kraemer (2017) (Open Access) compared the speaking proficiency on the SOPI of two groups of college students studying second-semester German (N=52). Students in one group were given iPads for 13 weeks, and assigned three short (average: 75 seconds) speaking assignments each week which they had to record on their iPad. Assignments talking […]
This Week In Language Education: May 5, 2017
Winners of the Week: Books and Reading A new Dutch study published in Scientific Studies of Reading provides more support for the notion that access to books promotes reading, and reading improves comprehension. The researchers examined relationship between the home literacy environment, a child’s print exposure (amount of reading), and reading comprehension. “Home literacy environment” was a combined measure […]
This Week In Language Education: April 28, 2017
A Reverse Turing Test: Is Good Language Teaching Robot-Proof? The always brilliant Gene Glass provides a list of jobs that are “0% Automatable” (cannot be done by a robot) and “100% Automatable.” He uses the list to examine what schools teach and the future of our economy, but it is a question you may want to ask of your […]
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