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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

An abbreviated edition of TWILE since I’m traveling this week and next. But there’s one study that can’t wait . . . Reading Your Way to a Higher TOEIC® Score Mason and Krashen (2017) present a summary of eight case studies on the effect of free reading (reading for fun) on scores for the Test […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Note: This post is an experiment in which I link to and comment on recent news and research developments in language education. It’s the sort of thing I’d like to get in my own email box each week, but since no one else seems willing to do it, I’ll give it a go. Why Language Learning Apps […]