After the excitement of the rugby yesterday, today was much quieter with Him Indoors making a trip to the supermarket to get food and me doing the essaying in the dining room. I was upstairs initially but that meant that my beloved couldn't use his computer as it disturbed me (I'm aware I am sounding rather precious here) and downstairs I can spread out all over the table which is good as I'm much happier when I can distribute everything so that I can see it all.
I know that I'm definitely a teacher and not an applied linguist. The theory stuff is all very interesting but until we know definitely how the brain works and how we learn and then how we learn languages, everything is just a theory. There are thousands of studies into a few students and the researchers make a big song and dance about knowing the latest thing to be known, but the truth is they're all just theories. It depends on what is being studied, the students being studied, and on top of all that, how the students feel that day. I've been trying to nail down 'critical period hypothesis today' but with a hundred odd studies, nobody really knows whether starting to learn a second language earlier makes any difference, other than to pronunciation. We all knew that anyway.
When I did a post graduate certificate in distance based learning we studies all manner of theories about how people learn differently. Having learned all these schools of thought it turned out that people use all of them to learn anyway.
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