Re: pre-english... for adult students of english as a foreign language


That's interesting. If it's so good, presumably you'll be wanting
to publish some detailed academic description for the greater good
of the EF/SL world, maybe with some case studies. I look forward
to reading it.

.that is a possibility, but it will have to be some
sort of collaboration, because i probably won't
write it myself

Make sure you get someone whose name starts with a letter after yours
in the alphabet. If we wrote it it'd be 'Cat and Stone (2006)'.
You've done all the work; you want it to be 'Stone and X (2006)'.



.i do hope to get this information out... but i'm
just going to have to do it my way... as clumsy
as it is
.i'm content to allow my students (the marketplace)
decide if my method is useful or not

Well, if people buy it...

Do you get a lot of business off USENET postings? Is there an online
demo?


.

(aside rant)

That's OK, I didn't notice you ranting.

.i left academe in the eighties
.it had begun to interfere with my education

It does that. You can learn a lot by talking to people on buses.

.i knew exactly which aspects of language i was
interested in exploring, but, my ideas were too
"interdisciplinary" (even in that time) for any
graduate schools within my reach

Talk to me about it. You try doing a combined studies degree in Drama,
Geography and the History of Ideas.


.at the following link, see a bibliography, documenting
some of the influences on my thinking after leaving
the university

http://www.gendo.net/gendo/bib.html

Bryson's funny but doesn't understand the sociolinguistic and other
texts he draws on.

Capra's Tao Of Physics was a brilliant, influential book I had to read
for a college module called 'Space, Time, Matter and Causality in 20
Century Physics', which was hard work.

de Bono and his 'Lateral Thinking' is pretty much discredited. The
consensus is that he claims to have invented something everybody does
all the time anyway.

I must get round to the rest sometime, but these days I mostly stick
with 'Viz'.



Seriously, Heron, I'd like to know more about this. I don't
actually understand what you're claiming to do here. You write

"it takes babies 5 to 10 years to master the sounds of english" ...
"you can do it in 100 to 300 hours of focused work"

but what are you actually saying here? That children don't 'hear'
(recognise?), and can't produce, the phonetic system of their first
language until they're ten years old? Are you serious?

.i agree... that is not well written
.i struggled with that sentence... trying to cram a lot
of info into a few words

Really?

.most kids have pretty much got the basics by 5-7
.but some kids a much slower and many are still refining
it up to puberty

Well, why even mention an age? How about:

.. learning language is part of growing up
.. children learn to speak their mother language over a period of years
.. we can help you to learn a new language in the way children learn
.. you can do it in only 100 to 300 hours of focused work
.. we help you learn to hear the sounds of english in the way a child
does

That last bit is hogwash, but that's not stopped dozens of language
schools (including the three big chains L*********, B****** and
in******) making similar claims, and it ought to bring the punters in.

And a word to the wise, Heron; the art of writing advertising for
courses for people wanting to learn English, is to make sure the
potential client can read and understand your copy. That means it has
to be in clear, standard English. With capital letters and full-stops,
know what I mean?


.i'd be happy to talk with you about any of this
.please join me at 1222gendo on gizmo

Actually, I might one day, especially if you start offering Skype as
well...

any tuesday evening,
between 8 and 9 p.m., california time

however, sadly that's my 4 - 5 AM Wednesday morning, so don't hold your
breath just yet.

<snip>

what
does your programme actually involve pedagogically? What happens
inside the classroom?

<snip>


.this isn't done primarily in a class room
.it's done mostly by a student at a computer, transcribing
audio files into a fone*** script of my making

I have a friend in Hamburg who's working on a similar idea. I don't
see it myself, but he's very keen.


.students spend at least 10 hours of personal practice for
every hour of instructor time

Cheap, too. This is why W*** S***** have schools in Shanghai with
acres of PC's and hardly any teachers.





.once they can hear accurately, they can begin
to correct their own speaking without my
assistance

I still don't understand 'hear accurately'. So what do they do,
differentiate minimal pairs? What are they actually transcribing?



Just doing this in the US are we then, Heron?

.most of my students have been asians... chinese, korean
and japanese primarily, but some thai, vietnamese, lao,
and others from all over... middle east, africa and europe
.all immigrants in south california

.i'm currently testing my material with three students: one in
china, another chinese living in canada, and a moroccan

In Morroco? How do the results for your China-based Chinese student
compare with the one in Canada?


.it's beginning to look like i can teach students from all
over the world right from my desktop

.i'm beginning to suspect that my method may be best suited
to asians
.i've noticed that they have unique difficulties not
experienced by europeans and middle easterners

Heron, that's a lot like saying "I've noticed when you put sugar in tea
it makes it sweeter".

The problem with your insisting that mainstream writing on ELT,
Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition etc etc etc has nothing to
teach you, is that you're going to be forever reinventing the wheel.

Yes, students from Asia have particular problems in language learning
that are different those encountered by other groups. Japanese
students will have different problems from Chinese learners, but there
will be similarities in the types of problems, in the same way that
French learners will share parts of a problem set with Italian
speakers. For that matter, English speakers have a particular set of
problems for any given language we come to learn; our modal verbs don't
map well onto German ones, for example.

But all this is ancient history, Heron. If you want to learn exactly
*which* different problems are common to speakers of Chinese, Japanese,
Vietnamese, Thai and a couple of dozen other languages, (with detailed
information about the respective phonological systems) I strongly
recommend you get hold of 'Learner English' by Swan and Smith. After
that Krashen and Tyrell's SLA stuff would probably be a better business
investment than any more Krishnamurti or Ouspensky.


.my method may be an answer to a problem that is particular
to asian learners

It's a big market. People in that part of the world like to learn on
computers.



BTW, your 'full-stop' at the start of a sentence thing drives people
completely spare. Couldn't you just write normally, just for us,
just for five minutes, yes? Pretty please?

Of course, I can.

Thank you. It means a lot to some of us.

.but i choose to write this way

It must be a pain in the arse to spell check.

.i have flame-retardant clothing

I've not flamed you, Heron, I've taken the trouble to engage with what
you posted. If you come on to AUE and other groups with didactic
pronouncements that verge on spamming, you're going to encounter people
who take you up on them.

___
Nature, heron stone
to be commanded, http://www.gendo.net
must be obeyed. mailto:heronDO@xxxxxxxxx

I don't thing nature can, or should be, commanded.

.. have a nice day

DC
.