| Friday, July 16, 2010

I’m well into the first few chapters of Marva Collins’ Way now and I’ve come across some great quotes which are relevant for you if you are learning a language, teaching a language, translating something or writing a blog.

W hen I arrived in Murcia, people started asking me the question hundreds of thousands of Spanish people must have asked thousands of English people living in Spain over the years: “Can you teach me some English?”

Some would ask me from time to time if I could translate a document for them and that’s basically how my business was born.

I never received any formal teaching training—having turned down the PCGE place after finishing my degree in Modern Language & Linguistics—and I never did a TEFL course, either.

I just started listening to what my students were doing, what they told me their problems were and how they were trying to learn and, together, we started improving their learning techniques and their English started getting better.

One of the first things I noted when I started teaching English was that Spanish people’s pronunciation of English was generally abysmal. It seemed very few teachers had even tried to teach their students how to pronounce English words properly. Fortunately, a large part of my degree was the study of linguistics.

I discovered something about sounds in those first classes, which is, in my view, crucial to language learning. Marva Collins discovered it teaching her children, too:

“Sounds are like keys, opening the doors to words. If you don’t have the right key, you can’t open the door to your house, can you? If you don’t have the right sounds, you can’t pronounce a word.”

I also have my students read articles (and other texts) aloud in almost every class.  We generally look at news articles or professional articles related to their speciality, not the classics, although it might be fun to read some Marcus Aurelius or Aristotle with my students this next academic year.

What does Marva Collins have to say about reading aloud and language learning?

“Another reason for reading aloud is to build vocabulary. A child reading silently skips over big words he doesn’t know. When I am there listening to a child read, I can interrupt to ask the meaning.” “By reading aloud children learn to understand words within the context of a sentence, and they see how words connect with each other to express an idea.”