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Money where the Language Mouth Is
This past week I decided that to become a better teacher, I needed to commit to a language again. This has been on the back of my mind for some time. I’ve had several excellent excuses for not working...
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Puzzle Patterns, Bells and Structure
I often think of decoding grammar as piecing together a giant word filled jigsaw puzzle. A thousand pieces to put together on a kitchen table is really not so daunting compared to the complex ways...
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Mother Tongue Tuesday: Moldavian
Before my students educated me, I had pictured the Soviet Union as one solid mass of land with only Russian speakers across the expanse. I also never heard of the tiny landlocked sliver of Moldova...
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Mother Tongue Tuesday: Arabic
The young woman stood before me speaking English clearly with an accent that rounded out sounds. Her eyes lit with joy as her tight curls framed her face. She struggled with her writing, she said, and...
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Mother Tongue Tuesday: Ukrainian
Україна When I first started teaching immigrants instead of international students like the Japanese young people in my last post , I had a classroom full of Ukrainian men mixed in with a few Russians...
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Mother Tongue Tuesday: Vietnamese
Not too long after I started working with the Ukrainian welders, I began a class with Vietnamese studying Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC). This class was much smaller – about 5 instead...
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Mother Tongue Tuesday: Russian
After a day in Tian An Men Square with a trip to the mausoleum to see Mao Tse Tung, I stayed in a hotel nearby with many other tourists. I went down to the lobby to write for my first NaNoWriMo...
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Mother Tongue Tuesday (on Wednesday): Marshallese
http://www.amazon.com/Places-Before-2014-Page-A-Day-Calendar/dp/0761173994 The other day in my 1000 Places to Visit Before you Die calendar, I saw Chuuk Lagoon. It sits in the Pacific, far out and...
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Wednesday Wonders: Stretching Some Sentence Skills
Not too long ago, I was correcting papers and wishing the writers would not be so inventive with their sentence structures and vocabulary. I would see something with a phrase, a comma, or an...
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