Academic writing and my failure to grasp a learnable moment The question. My first job out of grad school was at a Chinese-Canadian partnership university. I taught academic writing, and for many of my students it was their first time writing essays in English. One day a student send
If you looked at 5 Reasons to Love Turkish you will remember that Turkish is a wonderful language to learn: it impresses native and non-native speakers alike, it is easy to pronounce, its words are generally short and memorable, and it designates no gender to nouns, or even to pronoun
Resources for Raising Bilingual Children: Music I thought I’d take a break from musing about raising a bilingual child and talk about some resources that our family has used. Our daughter absolutely adores the library, I think it comes second only to the park in the list of fun
Why Turkish should be your next language to learn 1. It’s impressive. Few people learn Turkish as an additional language. As a result, native Turkish speakers praise you for your efforts. “Your Turkish is amazing!” they will say. “Turkish is so difficult!” they will say. People who do
Simple Social Justice Lessons from the Spanish Classroom In earlier blog posts, Mary and I have described what we mean by Progressive Language Teaching and Social Justice Education. Today I would like to share a few examples of how I teach Spanish for social justice. It’s actually qui
Nostalgia and life lessons in learning to read Chinese Mary Leighton’s post earlier this week about feeling like a child when learning a language made me reflect on my own return to childhood through my learning of Chinese. One challenge of being a kid again linguistically is finding
The pleasures and frustrations of learning a new language From fully-functioning adult Speaking my mother tongue all day and being understood is a privilege. Whether I go to the library, the bike shop, the café, or the office, I carry all the necessary vocabulary and grammar and all t
My Work with UNICEF Peru – Part 1 In June 2013, I began a six month position as a Junior Professional Consultant in Education Research at UNICEF Peru in Lima. The position is part of the UN Professional Placement Program with the United Nations Association in Canada. My terms of
Bilingual Action Plan Creating a bilingual action plan is not something that I would think of doing on my own. However, I see the value in really thinking about and discussing the kind of bilingualism that we aspire for in our family. Step 2 in Dr. Steiner’s book is about concep
A resource for people who care about endangered languages Who uses this book Indigenous language speakers Minority language speakers Heritage language speakers Anyone who wants to pass on or learn a language in a one-on-one, master-apprentice format The rationale for a one-on-one, mas
