Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition is a classic text by Stephen Krashen. It is now available for free from his website
The download is at the top left under New Books.
God, try applying his methods to an average class in Taiwan! The adults will complain to the boss and quit your class in droves, and your boss will have absolutely no idea what you’re doing in kids’ classes and will NOT have your back with the parents.
Nonetheless, some salient points are made that can be applied to the sticky-ball milieu.
Cool! Thank you!
Used his book in college. The principles make sense, ring true and work.
You can apply input-based language teaching in any setting. There are a couple of things you can do quite easily. The nuts-and-bolts implementation of Krashen’s theories is TPRS, and the heart of TPRS is repetitive questioning, teaching narrow and deep (“less is more”), constantly popping up grammar points rather than teaching grammar lessons, and reading, reading, reading. While the pop-ups and the narrow and deep curriculum might be troublesome in Taiwan, you CAN easily do circling of statements (asking all possible questions of students based on a single sentence, comparing that sentence to a similar fact about a child/student in the classroom to get more repetitions, etc.) and extensive reading.
I’ve just returned from teaching Chinese as a demonstration at the 2009 TPRS national convention. There is a listserv available for anyone who wants to learn more as well, at groups.yahoo.com/group/moreTPRS
Terry
[quote=“ironlady”]
I’ve just returned from teaching Chinese as a demonstration at the 2009 TPRS national convention. There is a listserv available for anyone who wants to learn more as well, at groups.yahoo.com/group/moreTPRS
Terry[/quote]
Pretty cool, Ironlady! I wowwed a few rednecks here in Arkansas that way, too! Six months later, they could still remember what I taught them in all of 10 or 15 minutes!