Geoff Jordan is well known to some as an acerbic commentator on English Language Teaching (ELT) methodology. His blogs are well-informed and sometimes highly critical of individual scholars and teacher educators. This book is more measured in tone and provides a useful, clearly written introduction to 30 key concepts in second language acquisition research. (He explains in the text that he prefers the term ‘additional’ to ‘second’, but the title remains, probably because it is so widely used and understood.) Jordan’s main starting point for the book is that most language teaching fails and does so because teachers do not know enough about what research says about SLA. So the book aims to rectify this. Concepts covered include biggies such as explicit and implicit learning, comprehensible input, interlanguage, noticing, Universal Grammar versus Emergentism, aptitude, motivation, synthetic and analytic syllabuses. Other areas less familiar to many teachers include the social turn in...
In recent months I've been using ChatGPT a good deal to speed up my resource writing. Up to now, I haven't used it much at all for producing slides, but I decided I could make some useful slide decks for A-Level teachers. Funnily enough, I was never a great user of slides at A-level, preferring aural and written textual material. Why? Well, the obvious danger with PowerPoint is that it becomes too teacher-led and leads to a lecturing style with insufficient interaction with the class. Now, there may be a place for some lecturing, particularly in view of the AO4 requirement for A-level (AO4 means Assessment Objective 4, which is about cultural knowledge). So this is why I've made some sets of slides covering typcal A-level topics. So far I've done four, each with between 12 to 15 slides, covering the following topics: immigration, occupation, resistance and volunteering. More will follow. The main point of these slides is to provide factural information in French. The...