by John Fotheringham | Oct 29, 2018
Every few months it seems, another article or blog post comes out making sensationalist claims like “Texting is destroying our language!” and “Kids today don’t know how to write anymore thanks to texting and emoji!” In this great TED Talk, linguist John McWhorter makes the case for why texting does not mean the death of good writing skills, and even shares some positive linguistic and cultural aspects of this new communication medium.
by John Fotheringham | Aug 10, 2015
Every so often, I stumble across claims on the interwebs so outrageous that they immediately send me to the keyboard to write a blog post. As they say, the best way to complain is to create. One such example is the following statement I read on an education blog: “Anything students need to know has to be taught, not caught.” This sound bite seems logical to those who subscribe to traditional “sage on the stage” models of teaching, but it underpins a major misconception about language acquisition: the notion that languages can be taught at all.
by Saravanaa Vijay | Mar 18, 2014
I’ve already written many tens of thousands of words about how to learn Japanese using modern online tools, so it’s time to let someone else share their point of view on the subject. In this guest post, Saravanaa Vijay from Lang-8 (which happens to be one of my favorite online language learning tools!) discusses the advantages and disadvantages of learning languages online, and why Lang-8 should part of any language learner’s online arsenal.
