Tag: speaking

Categories
BRAVE Blog

How Body Language can affect your foreign language

body language in foreign languages

body language in foreign languagesThe relationship between language learning and nonverbal signals has been alluded to several times on this blog. The occasion for returning to this is a brilliant TED talk about the effect of body language on the mind. Can this matter for polyglots as well?

Continue reading “How Body Language can affect your foreign language”
Categories
BRAVE Blog

Research vs. response: 2 language learning modes & how to use them better

Don’t let the title put you off. This post is actually about something that happens every day for every language learner. And getting some answers to the questions listed here will improve the way you teach, learn or use foreign languages. Let’s get started: it all begins in a portrait gallery.

Continue reading “Research vs. response: 2 language learning modes & how to use them better”
Categories
BRAVE Blog

Privileged? Language learning could be different

Mahatma Gandhi
Photo Credit: Vinoth Chandar via Compfight

There is no easy way to write this post without sounding pompous. Let me start with a story.

Continue reading “Privileged? Language learning could be different”
Categories
BRAVE Blog

Moving On: Post-traumatic Language Learning

“We’re going to take your questions to people. Go out there and ask them, and note down the answers.”

We got the pens, paper and umbrellas (Wales!). We walked slowly to the Tourist Information Centre.
Ms Y walked up to me. She was a young Saudi lady, dressed traditionally and covered up. We walked together for a while.
“I have bad experiences with these kinds of lessons,” she said in her intermediate English. She told me of the last time she went out to speak to people as part of her English lesson. One of the local teenagers she spoke to took her worksheet and scribbled his answer – a string of abuse that she couldn’t understand until somebody explained this to her.
“I couldn’t come to school for a week, I was so depressed,” she said.
And yet she was with the rest of the class, walking out there, ready to speak to strangers in a strange language. Ready to be at risk, out of line. Smiling and looking forward to it.
Moving on.
This post is inspired by people like her.

Continue reading “Moving On: Post-traumatic Language Learning”
Categories
BRAVE Blog

Where’s Your Soap-Box? Spoken Word Poetry in Foreign Languages

Today, it’s personal. I’m sharing my biggest passion with you, and I’ve got reasons.

Continue reading “Where’s Your Soap-Box? Spoken Word Poetry in Foreign Languages”
Categories
BRAVE Blog

Self-Reliance in Language Learning: 5 Lessons from Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

In the middle of a snowy, dark winter, many years ago, Yours Truly spent many days and evenings in a cafe near a university – drinking gallons of latte, smoking his lungs out and reading everything he could borrow, buy or photocopy. Such were the joys of university life.

Fast forward several years, and many of the literary gems read during that period are already fading from memory. I loved English and American literature, but there was just too much of it for one boy to devour at once. There is one essay, however, which I can still quote at length; one brief account whose clarity and boldness still inspires me.

Today, I want to try to connect my admiration for Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” with language learning. It is clear to me that Emerson’s thoughts are useful guidelines for most people – and that language learners could do worse than to look to philosophy for inspiration. I hope that by the end of this brief post, it will become clear to you as well. I have selected my five favourite quotes – and will try to explain how they link to language learning.

Continue reading “Self-Reliance in Language Learning: 5 Lessons from Ralph Waldo Emerson”