Focal Skills on using Movies

There’s a flurry of discussion going on in response to Dr. Krashen’s rebuttal of a Washington Post article.

In the comments, Ashley Hastings refers to his Focal Skills website. I’ve just been there and have a feeling that he has a lot to teach us. This page on using movies is particularly interesting, partly because the program has found that a concentration on listening skills builds up reading, writing and speaking at the same rate, even with no focus on those skills.

Now that I’ve spent more time on the website, I want to go and train to be a teacher in that program. I love the research paper that emphasises that we don’t need to specifically teach grammar, vocabulary or even speaking.

Finally, this page on affective filter is absolutely my ideal for language classes. A couple of things probably just can’t happen in my high school classroom, especially the part about keeping groups of the same level together, but it is a tantalizing description of how people will best learn a language.

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