• Errors: When you get something wrong because you don’t know it. They have to do with lack of competence.
• Mistakes: When you get something wrong that you really know but you spaced out for some reason. They have to do with performance due to stress, etc.

In the Community Blackboard, the prompts guide people through the material and serve to inspire. If there are, say, three of them, each should address a different learning style: emotional, cognitive…

From last week: Jigsaw

It can be a great way to get people invested in the material and to be the expert. It doesn’t work if one student doesn’t do his/her piece. However, with many groups the peer pressure when someone messes up is incentive for them to perform better next time.

David’s “sharing” involved using psychological and theatrical techniques in language class: psych ones (e.g. meditation, relaxation) and theatrical ones to loosen up (volume modulation, voewl sounds, etc.)

Overcompensation: what happens when a language-learner encounters a sound that’s not native to their tongue, and over-uses it. “iy” is in many languages. “I” isn’t. So a Spanish speaker says “shits” instead of “sheets” because they’re overextending their knowledge because they don’t know where it should go, but know it happens a lot. Overcompensation often comes about when a teacher really stresses the difficulty of a particular feature of the language, so the student deals with it by overdoing it.

Sociolinguistic allophones are not just about social class, etc., but about register: amount of attention paid to speech. Low register is little attention. High register is lots of attention, e.g. in work setting.

Alex’s principle’s about teaching a new sound in a new language:

• Loup v lu
• Vous v vu

Etc. First he had the students say the sounds that they already knew (“your old friends”). He had them written on the board and pointed to them as a prompt for each person to say one. In a second column he had the “new friends” that were one-syllable minimal pairs. He pronounced the sets in comparison several times, and then had the students guess which he was saying. So at this point he was teaching by what something was not. Then he went through a step of having them think the sound without saying it, as he pointed from word to word.

Then he did some silliness: “J’ai mal au ___” to introduce people to the idea of a something-ache. Then his neck hurt “J’ai mal au cou.” So he had minimal sentence pairs, too. Then he collapsed to the ground and broke his leg: “J’ai mal au cul.” The visual aspect captured everyone’s attention and sense of humor and was a good cue for visual learners, who then listened to the two different pronunciations.

When he introduced the pronunciation of the sound and how people would make it (he postponed performance so it wasn’t scary), he said, “This will be really easy; there’s only one thing you have to do.” That really lowered the affective filter. Than he taught a trick, having the people go from saying a sound they knew and then simply round their mouth. In fact, the change wasn’t insignificant, but he made it easy. Instead of having them say the minimal pair, he had them transform a different vowel sound to the new one: lit to lu, rather than loup to lu.Then he called on people to get them to say it. If they got it wrong, he never corrected them. Nor did he say when people got it right. There was no evaluative comment.