JP Reads

So I’m rereading Lee & Van Patten 1995 Making Communicative Language Teaching Happen, and I’m so excited about it that I’ve sent Bill Van Patten some fan mail and I’ve decided to keep my reflections on this page in my blog. 

I’m sitting at the BEAUTIFUL Montlake branch of the Seattle Public Library, thinking about foreign language pedagogy and wondering if there’s anyplace in Shangai that can possbily be this cool (and have free wireless).  This building is all about hardwood and windows. 

Anyway, I’m keeping these notes online, because I don’t want to forget my thoughts as I read this book.  I learned in grad school that when I read texts, I look at and understand the words, and then forget them just as fast.  Of course, this would not do for my courses in Minimalist Syntax, so I developed a strategy of summarizing every single paragraph with a sentence or two in my laptop.

The result was astounding; I remembered everything I summarized, even if I never went back to my notes. 

So now that I’m reading Lee & Van Patten again, and I hope that the knowledge in this book will stick with me.  As a text book, it very profoundly influenced how I teach in the classroom, but over the years, the theoretical background has fallen away from me, and left me with teaching practices that are good, but feel more like habit and instinct than capital M “Method.”  So it will be good to reaccquaint myself with the capital M.