Language courses are like fad diets. For every language, there are dozens
or hundreds of different courses, which all work a little for some people
some of the time. But there is no language course that works for
practically everyone, practically every time.
Why should this be? We all learn our mother tongue at our mother's knee.
She doesn't need a degree to teach us, doesn't use textbooks or a
curriculum or the latest AV materials. Yet we all learn, at roughly the
same speed, so that by the time we're 6 years old we're all linguistic
adults. From that age, even the slowest can handle language well enough to
become politicians, army officers, preachers and used-car sales people.
And from that age, we find it harder and harder to acquire another language.
Another thing: consider an immigrant family coming to America. The father
gets a job and goes to night classes to study English. The mother goes to
classes at the local community college. The two kids aren't in school yet,
so they just hang out with kids they meet on the street.
Within a month or two, the kids can make their way in English. Within 6
months, they're starting to lose their accents. And within a year, they're
doing fine at school, reading and writing English.
Meanwhile Pop knows enough to get on at work, but not to read beyond the
headlines, and not enough to follow a sitcome on TV. Mom always asks the
kids to help translate at the store, or at the doctor's.
From this, anyone with any sense would conclude that formal classes don't
work, but informal learning does. Unfortunately, those who run our
educational systems are committed to formal classes. They should be
committed to an entirely different place instead...
Here we see two paradoxes: one, we all learn our own language without any
trouble. And children seem to learn a second language quite easily without
formal instruction, while adults don't do nearly as well with it.
Any language teacher who wants to become excellent at the job needs to be
able to explain these paradoxes, instead of just ignoring them and hoping
nobody else will notice.
But they're easy to explain and easy to understand if we grasp the simple
fact that language is a function of the language brain, designed to fit it
like a key fits a lock. Once we accept that, we can begin to ask ourselves
how the language brain works, and once we have answers, we can begin to
design language acquisition courses that really work.
At EMRI, we researched the language brain. The result is a course we call
LingoRobics with Phrazers. It works just the way Nature works, to transfer
an additional language to an adult speaker in a remarkably short time, with
the proper accent and body language, with a good grasp of the grammar, and
with the ability to build an impressive vocabulary.
In Teaching Language to the Language Brain we show you how the language
brain works, and how understanding it leads inevitably to LingoRobics with
Phrazers.
The book comes to you with a Phrazer of your choice - choose from Spanish,
Swahili, Zulu, Arabic, Chinese, English or Turkish.
Read Teaching Language to the Language Brain, learn how to use the Phrazer,
and become the best language teacher you know!
When you buy Teaching Language to the Language Brain, you get access to our
online discussion group, where you will meet teachers like yourself who are
striving to be better teachers, to do better by their students.
If you're in South Africa, click here to order Teaching Language to the Language Brain for R295.
If you're in the USA, click here to buy it for $49.95. Both versions come with a free Phrazer.
