O "to be" estar and other essays

I want to use this opportunity to talk about a book I've been struggling with. Writing about such things often helps me sort out what I still have to do to finish.

It's a book of things I wrote in my 30-year career of language teaching. The essay "O 'to be' estar" for example is about how a language learner has to develop a system of figuring out whether he/she wants to use "ser" or "estar" when speaking Spanish, and set up a system in their production mechanism. But some are about language as a self-organizing system - I want to document when I came up with "Right Metaphor, Wrong Conclusion" and first laid out my theory of language.

I went through many years of encouraging the exploration of technology in language teaching. This was partly because I saw my students enter the world of technology with their skills, and I also saw such things as auto-correct severely bend their perception of "right" and "wrong." As a teacher, I even incorporated chat in writing class and presented on the idea, though I found people weren't as receptive to it as some of the other things I did. Nevertheless, this book would be a sum of all the philosophical paths that I followed. As such it is kind of a record of some of the changes in the ESL world.

As an example of that, I lived through the Truscott era, where people advocated not making any grammatical corrections, ever, on student writing. There was good justification for this, but I was against it, because my students published their work and I wanted it to be presentable. I also noticed that they learned more from correction that had no pressure on it, no pressure other than making it presentable for publication, that is, and knowing that they had expressed themselves successfully in public, albeit with my grammatical input, was always a motivating factor for them.

This book has been hampered by two problems: First, when I start to work on it, it's like going back to work, and I basically just retired, and am having a hard time "just going back to work." Second, some of the articles are dated somewhat already, and I have to just get over it, and publish them anyway. It's a kind of record of what I wrote over a long span, in any case.

One of the first articles in it was one about the "translation plateau" - that point in a learner's path where the learner decides not to translate every single word, but rather to stay in the second language without translating. It is, for readers, a moment of changing one's system toward more efficiency and away from the comfortable and familiar. It is not an easy spot to be at, and some learners have gone home and given up instead of taking what psychologically is a jump to a small rock in a fast river. But the article is about focusing on the learner's psychological condition - how they themselves are dealing with parsing the words - and helping them over a rough patch.

Before that, I did two things that are not in the book. One was incorporate live drama in speaking classes. Another was about learning disabilities in second language learning. These are interesting, but much of the work that went with them is pretty buried. And now you're talking twenty five, thirty years ago. That's a bit of a stretch.

Still, I'll probably publish something. Not today or tomorrow, but soon. And I'll put it here; anyone on this site will see it as soon as anyone.

wiki people readers

This little pop-art represents an experiment which I will explain. It is here.

At this site you will find esl/efl exercises. At one time I was really good at making them, but now I admit to being a little rusty. I am trying to get my chops back by working on these.

The genius of the project, from an esl point of view, is that you can read about the people you are interested in, or the people whose names you recognize. If this project is successful it will have hundreds. People's names will make up a nice huge list in the template, and you can just work your way down getting the ones you like. I may categorize them as high, intermediate and low, or short, medium and long, depending on how hard they are or how much English they have in them. I plan to provide the answers as well. It's kind of a long-range project.

After thirty years in ESL I can say this much: I can get this skill back easily, but, having burnt out a little (in esl one works very hard for a very long time, for very little pay), I find myself giving up easily as well. In other words, I am enjoying retirement.

I am experimenting with ways to develop a market for books. My books are on the esl/efl side: they are readable americana. I am hoping that these exercises will also be readable, practical, and interesting, in that interesting people will be in there. I hope you enjoy them.

Unloading & the early esl stories

now on ACX

Here is my other work....

update

I have recently retired from a 30-year career mostly teaching ESL, but also teaching EFL, math, English, and music. Part of that career included voluminous writing, much of which is here. If I'm smart I can organize it, show it, and link to it from here. I can publish some of it, too, if I can pull it all together.

Most of my published work is here. I've been absorbed in short stories, haiku, and family genealogy, though I've also done Quaker plays and might do more of them. I'm letting go of the haiku. But I'm trying to finish some long-awaited novels.

With my language-related work, there is part of it that is timeless, and part that is not. To be brief, I believed that the integration of technology into our writing systems changed not only our systems but our understanding, and that it was a constantly evolving picture. I saw it as I taught. The technology taught as I taught, alongside me, and it changed the way people saw the language.

I will try to sort through the work I did and save what I can. I am still invited to TESOL regularly and have a strong impulse to go, but on the other hand, at 66, and afraid of covid and all, I think I'll just sort & publish what I've got, and call it a life. TESOL was supposed to be in Denver this year - doable for me, as I am only one state away - but not only was I busy, with the last of four children, all locked down, but also, it was canceled. Pushed aside. We language teaching specialists will have to just ruminate for a while. Look for changes on this site, soon.