Thinking In A Foreign Language

Many of the vocabulary items that foreign language learners encounter involve figurative extensions of meaning. For example, bottleneck, hard-headed and getting a foot in the door all involve figurative extensions of parts of the body. To understand words and expressions such as these, language learners often need to employ figurative thinking. This book examines the nature of figurative thinking, considers its contribution to communicative language ability, and explores the implications for language teaching and learning.

Benny Lewis, who speaks over ten languages—all self-taught—runs the largest language-learning blog in the world, Fluent In 3 Months. Lewis is a full-time "language hacker," someone who devotes all of his time to finding better, faster, and more efficient ways to learn languages. Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World is a new blueprint for fast language learning. Lewis argues that you don't need a great memory or "the language gene" to learn a language quickly, and debunks a number of long-held beliefs, such as adults not being as good of language learners as children.

This New York Times bestseller is an exciting and fearless investigation of language from the author of Rationality, The Better Angels of Our Nature and The Sense of Style and Enlightenment Now. "Curious, inventive, fearless, naughty." --The New York Times Book Review Bestselling author Steven Pinker possesses that rare combination of scientific aptitude and verbal eloquence that enables him to provide lucid explanations of deep and powerful ideas. His previous books - including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Blank Slate - have catapulted him into the limelight as one of today's most important popular science writers. In The Stuff of Thought, Pinker presents a fascinating look at how our words explain our nature. Considering scientific questions with examples from everyday life, The Stuff of Thought is a brilliantly crafted and highly readable work that will appeal to fans of everything from The Selfish Gene and Blink to Eats, Shoots & Leaves.

Annotation The three pocketbooks comprising the 'English Through Pictures Series' are the remarkable invention of I A Richards and Christine Gibson, who designed them to help the learner speak, read and write English in the quickest and clearest possible way -- through pictures. The authors have made a careful selection of the most widely useful English words, choosing those with the power to define other words, and have put them to work in key patterns that offer the learner the ability to communicate successfully in English. Book 1 contains a vocabulary of 250 such words, with an additional 500 developed in Book 2; these 750 words are then used in Book 3 to build a command of 1000 words which, by their defining power, hold the possibility of understanding as much as another 20,000 words of English. Throughout 'English Through Pictures', responsibility for learning is placed directly on the learner, who from the very start enjoys the ability to put essential words to work creating key sentence patterns where meaning is clearly shown in pictures. These simplified drawings allow learners to focus on the sentence and to enjoy growing confidence as they successfully take control of language, with the workbooks in Books 1 and 2 challenging and reinforcing their growing competence as both speakers and readers. Motivated and inspired, learners will soon find to their delight that fluent communication in English -- the common language of today's world -- lies well within their grasp. 'English Through Pictures' has already been used successfully by millions of learners in over forty countries.

Forget everything you’ve heard about adult language learning: evidence from cognitive science and psychology prove we can learn foreign languages just as easily as children. An eye-opening study on how adult learners can master a foreign lanugage by drawing on skills and knowledge honed over a lifetime. Adults who want to learn a foreign language are often discouraged because they believe they cannot acquire a language as easily as children. Once they begin to learn a language, adults may be further discouraged when they find the methods used to teach children don't seem to work for them. What is an adult language learner to do? In this book, Richard Roberts and Roger Kreuz draw on insights from psychology and cognitive science to show that adults can master a foreign language if they bring to bear the skills and knowledge they have honed over a lifetime. Adults shouldn't try to learn as children do; they should learn like adults. Roberts and Kreuz report evidence that adults can learn new languages even more easily than children. Children appear to have only two advantages over adults in learning a language: they acquire a native accent more easily, and they do not suffer from self-defeating anxiety about learning a language. Adults, on the other hand, have the greater advantages—gained from experience—of an understanding of their own mental processes and knowing how to use language to do things. Adults have an especially advantageous grasp of pragmatics, the social use of language, and Roberts and Kreuz show how to leverage this metalinguistic ability in learning a new language. Learning a language takes effort. But if adult learners apply the tools acquired over a lifetime, it can be enjoyable and rewarding.

In this entertaining and groundbreaking book, Dr. Paul Pimsleur, creator of the renowned Pimsleur Method, the world leader in audio-based language learning, shows how anyone can learn to speak a foreign language. If learning a language in high school left you bruised, with a sense that there was no way you can learn another language, How to Learn a Foreign Language will restore your sense of hope. In simple, straightforward terms, Dr. Pimsleur will help you learn grammar (seamlessly), vocabulary, and how to practice pronunciation (and come out sounding like a native). The key is the simplicity and directness of Pimsleur’s approach to a daunting subject, breaking it down piece by piece, demystifying the process along the way. Dr. Pimsleur draws on his own language learning trials and tribulations offering practical advice for overcoming the obstacles so many of us face. Originally published in 1980, How to Learn a Foreign Language is now available on the 50th anniversary of Dr. Pimsleur’s publication of the first of his first audio courses that embodied the concepts and methods found here. It's a fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of the mind of this amazing pioneer of language learning.

Pushing the field forward in critically important ways, this book offers clear curricular directions and pedagogical guidelines to transform foreign language classrooms into environments where stimulating intellectual curiosity and tapping critical thinking abilities are as important as developing students’ linguistic repertoires. The case is made for content-based instruction—an approach to making FL classrooms sites where intellectually stimulating explorations are the norm rather than the exception. The book explicitly describes in detail how teachers could and should use content-based instruction, explains how integration of content and language aims can be accomplished within a program, identifies essential strategies to support this curricular and pedagogical approach, discusses issues of assessment within this context, and more. Content-Based Foreign Language Teaching provides theoretical perspectives and empirical evidence for reforming curricula and instruction, describes models and curriculum planning strategies that support implementation of well-balanced FL programs, explores the transformative potential of critical pedagogy in the FL classroom, and offers illustrations of secondary and post-secondary language programs that have experimented with alternative approaches. Advancing alternatives to conventional curriculum design, this volume posits meaning-oriented approaches as necessary to create language programs that make a great difference in the overall educational lives of learners

A study tested hypotheses concerning thinking in a foreign language. Specifically, it looked at whether (1) inferencing in a foreign language relies on mental models and propositional thinking; (2) the three stages of the theory of comprehension apply to understanding foreign-language discourse; and (3) propositional thinking manifests native language influence. The subjects were Finnish secondary school students with nine years of English language training. The study analyzed false responses to a cloze test to examine the processes underlying them. Results supported all three hypotheses, but the cloze procedure was found to be a limited tool for measuring comprehension. (MSE)