teaching languages at low levels Archives

Tag: teaching languages at low levels

Aiming for average

Written by Andrew Walkley on February 1, 2024. Posted in Opinions. No Comments on Aiming for average

An amazing feat, but that’s all I recently watched Nyad – a new film about the super-endurance swimmer Diane Nyad, who swam from Cuba to Florida. I like these kinds of stories, and the achievements they depict are often pretty amazing – but I’m turned off if they are presented as models of how to achieve things in life, which is exactly what happens at the end of Nyad. I buy these stories as entertainment, but I don’t buy into the lessons that are supposed to be learnt: “Look at me and learn how anything is possible if you just believe in yourself”, “Follow your dreams and give...

Back in class: thoughts from learning and teaching languages at low levels

Written by Andrew Walkley on January 19, 2024. Posted in Opinions. No Comments on Back in class: thoughts from learning and teaching languages at low levels

During the eighteen months of writing the new edition of Outcomes I put my teaching and language learning efforts on hold. Back in January 2022, when we started the project, I was teaching a beginner Spanish class and learning Russian, but it quickly became clear that my addled brain was not going to do multi-tasking very well, so the lessons came to an end. Now Outcomes is finished and I’m back in the classroom. I’m teaching a low-level Spanish class with a colleague at Lexical Lab and also starting again with Russian as what I guess you might describe as a false beginner. In both...