The new-look frenchteacher.net site is now up and running. Thanks to Harry Green for the redesign. I have left some of the resources free (Spanish, powerpoints, teacher guides and whiteboard notes and links). The main resources sections are accessible by subscription at £20 per year. Just go to the site if you wish to sign up. I have chosen a low cost annual subscription, hoping that lots of people will choose to continue using the resources. I shall be adding lots of new stuff.
I hope you like the simple, easy to navigate design.
http://www.frenchteacher.net
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).
I'm so disappointed that you have started charging for the use of this excellent resource. I'm a Canadian teacher and really enjoyed using your site. I know your nominal fee is small, but we don't get a budget for this sort of thing. I'll really miss your excellent resources.
ReplyDeleteIt's been free for ages, but as I am retiring and wish to write new resources with no classes to teach, it seemed daft not to charge. If it were me, I'd stump up the £20 myself to save me some time preparing!
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