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.