Ross Thorburn rejects the illogical insistence upon banning mother tongues in the second-language classroom The War on Drugs In 1998, the United Nations decided that it was going to eradicate drugs from planet Earth by 2008. The project was doomed to failure from the start. Human beings have been getting high since prehistoric times….
Antura and the Letters and Feed the Monster, the two winners of the EduApp4Syria innovation competition, were announced today and then released worldwide as open-source Arabic literacy learning games. Both games are available for free download through Google Play and the App Store. The EduApp4Syria competition was launched in January 2016 as a challenge to…
Chris Powers, an international education expert, will become TESOL International Association’s new executive director effective May 2017. “Chris’s values and passion for language education, as well as his vision for TESOL clearly stood out in the interview process,” says Ester de Jong, chair of the search task force and current TESOL president. “He conveyed a…
A 17-country report just released by global market analysts, GfK, shows that 30% of the international online population read books”every day or most days”. This is led by China at 36%, closely followed by Spain and the UK at 32% each. However, if the segment is widened to include both daily readers and those who…
The English language has progressed over time without a handbook or guidance, so one would think that the structure within the language would be nonexistent. A new study, however, proves otherwise. The study, by Kristian Berg of the University of Oldenburg and Mark Aronoff of Stony Brook University is titled “Self-Organization in the Spelling of…
Part I in Language Magazine’s series in which we ask key figures in the world of language education what President Trump should do to improve educational outcomes in the U.S. A Six-Step Plan Stephen Krashen1. Focus on PovertyThe most consistent and powerful predictor of school achievement is poverty. When researchers control for the effect…
A new study, titled “Late Bilinguals Are Sensitive to Unique Aspects of Second Language Processing: Evidence from Clitic Pronouns Word-Order” asked whether English speakers who become highly proficient at a late age in Spanish could understand grammatical constructions that are present in Spanish but not in English. The study is hinged on the longstanding question…
The Toronto and York Region Labor Council (TYRLC) has released a series of videos aimed to help Chinese workers with limited proficiency with English confront worker’s rights, labor laws, and other work-related issues. The Toronto and York Region council is based out of Ontario, Canada, and “combines the strength of hundreds of local unions… [and…
Netflix has just released its new Spanish-language series, Ingobernable. Netflix has had its fair share of success recently in the Spanish-language department, most notably the 2015 Spanish-language drama Narcos, a crime drama filmed in Colombia that follows the story of drug kingpin, Pablo Escobar. Narcos was wildly successful with American audiences, and presumably proved to…
ATi Studios has released a virtual reality app for language education to combine the artificial-intelligence technology behind chatbots with speech recognition in virtual reality. Learn Languages VR by Mondly allows people to experience lifelike conversations with virtual characters, in 28 different languages. The new VR application is intended to realize virtual reality’s promise of rich,…