Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Week nine diary

We had a good discussion in class today on the topic of learning styles and strategies. I might move up the readings on these topics earlier in the course next time.

Most of the students seem to be good at style shifting already, and many of them characterized themselves (as did I) as "a little bit of both" of each set of opposed styles. This make sense since all of us are "good language learners" and people who have learned more than one language already.

We brainstormed ways to motivate a learner who is struggling with the lack of feedback: having her give reports on specific things she has done, using checklists to monitor the completion of tasks and goals, giving feedback on each other's blogs, etc. And the students planned a social time when they will each work on their learning at the same time/place and then reward themselves afterwards with a drink or something. Whatever works!

We talked about a new research study that claims that learning new words causes the same pleasure in the brain as sex or chocolate and the students are all going to try to learn a certain number of new words in the next week and report back on this.

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