Skip to main content

Why not become a GILT-er?

GILT stands for Global Innovative Language Teachers and is a Facebook closed group set up by Gianfranco Conti. If you use Facebook, just search for it. Unlike the other very good UK Facebook groups for modern language teachers, such as Secondary MFL Matters and MFL Teachers' Lounge, this one aims to bring together teachers of all languages, including EFL teachers, from around the world.

Within a few days the groups has seen well over 1000 teachers sign up from places including the UK, Australia, Canada, the USA, France and Malaysia. Early threads have been very busy with teachers from various backgrounds and diverse methodologies sharing ideas and asking questions. Gianfranco and others have opened up some some good topics such as: what are the qualities of a good Head of Department? What was your best ever lesson? How full should a scheme of work be? How does TPRS work? What is AIM all about? What was the funniest thing a student ever said or wrote?

The guidelines of the group invite people to openly share ideas, be critical where needed, but stay wthin the bounds of professional courtesy. I'm sure Gianfranco's aim is for the group to be as lightly moderated as possible by its administrators (who include myself and a range of people of different experience). I like the fact that the group is an opportunity to open up minds to unfamiliar ways of thinking about language teaching. We'll see how successful the group is: some may find it too general for their taste, others too parochial. It will only be as successful as contributors make it.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

12 principles of second language teaching

This is a short, adapted extract from our book The Language Teacher Toolkit . "We could not possibly recommend a single overall method for second language teaching, but the growing body of research we now have points to certain provisional broad principles which might guide teachers. Canadian professors Patsy Lightbown and Nina Spada (2013), after reviewing a number of studies over the years to see whether it is better to just use meaning-based approaches or to include elements of explicit grammar teaching and practice, conclude: Classroom data from a number of studies offer support for the view that form-focused instruction and corrective feedback provided within the context of communicative and content-based programmes are more effective in promoting second language learning than programmes that are limited to a virtually exclusive emphasis on comprehension. As teachers Gianfranco and I would go along with that general view and would like to suggest our own set of g