Reading Chapter One actually made me excited about reading this book. I was unconvinced that it would have anything useful in it but reading through Blake's Preface and first chapter convinced me that he would provide tools that were useful for Language teachers. I enjoyed that Blake said outright that he was not trying to replace face to face interaction as an important part of second language learning, but rather to create an avenue for those students who did not have the money or availability to have the face to face interaction.
One thing that really stood out to me in this chapter were Blake's staggering statistics on second language learning. I could not believe that "20 weeks of intensive, full time study at 30 hours per week" was the time commitment determined for learning a language. I understand that language fluency is a big commitment but when he gave the number 30 hours per week it really made me consider what I am doing right now to integrate language into my life. This brings up the great point of how we can train students to integrate language into their lives. Whether integration is through music, movies, or chatting on the internet with native speakers, it is so important to make language a part of what we do.
1 comment:
I think those statistics are ones we need to be more familiar with and communicate to our colleagues who wonder why our L2 students can't communicate fluently in a short time!
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