Quotes & Sayings About Language Learning And Teaching

Current teaching practices tend to begin with syntacticalisation and then move onto lexicalisation. I now believe that this may not be the most efficient approach, as it tends to restrict the amount of language that is presented to the learner, and also tends to involve less memory-based learning than I think is necessary to develop spontaneously produced language. — George Woolard

Academic training actively deprives you of the qualities that make for good teaching. A good teacher speaks plainly, in vivid, accessible language, because she is addressing what amounts to a general audience. But the kind of jargon academics learn to use is designed to repel the uninitiated. A good teacher ranges widely, making connections among subjects as well as from learning to life. But academics are constrained to specialize, and increasingly, to hyperspecialize, looking neither left nor right as they plow their little corner of the field. — William Deresiewicz

It needs more than ever to be stressed that the best and truest educators are parents under God. The greatest school is the family. In learning, no act of teaching in any school or university compares to the routine task of mothers in teaching a babe who speaks no language the mother tongue in so short a time. No other task in education is equal to this. The moral training of the children, the discipline of good habits, is an inheritance from the parents to the children which surpasses all other. The family is the first and basic school of man. — Rousas John Rushdoony

It is no secret that the fruits of language study are in no sort of relation to the labour spent on teaching and learning them. — Edward Sapir

In the absence of either a widely accepted theory of language learning or a solid empirical base for classroom practice, teachers and learners have always been, and will always be, vulnerable to drastic pendulum swings of fashion, the coming and going of various unconventional and unlamented "Wonder Methods" being an obvious recent example. The sad truth is that after at least 2,000 years, most language teaching takes place on a wing and a prayer - sometimes successfully, but often a relative failure. — Michael H. Long

new strategies in teaching and learning English language — Wilga Rivers

All the teaching I had ever received had failed to make me apply such intelligence as I was possessed of, directly and vividly: there had never been any sunshine, as regards language, in the earlier grey days of learning, for the sky had always pelted with gerunds and optatives. — E.F. Benson

One barrier ... is the impoverishment of classroom language, the failure to cultivate a common vocabulary about inquiry, explanation, argument and problem solving. — David Perkins

Go to the place where the thing you wish to know is native; your best teacher is there. Where the thing you wish to know is so dominant that you must breathe its very atmosphere, there teaching is moat thorough, and learning is most easy. You acquire a language most readily in the country where it is spoken; you study mineralogy boat among miners; and so with everything else. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Having replaced instinct with language, society, and culture, we are the only species that depends on teaching and learning. We aren't human without them. In them is true power. But are they the occupations of the rich and mighty? — Ursula K. Le Guin