New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby Le Baron » Sun May 28, 2023 9:21 pm

No-one can be criticised for being caught on the hop with a language they don't use every day, that's always difficult. He clearly understands very well, yet the speaking is fairly bad. Speaking on-the-fly is hard though.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby Vordhosbn » Sun May 28, 2023 10:15 pm

I speak with him every week in German and have also spoken to him a number of times in French and once in Spanish. He also teaches a majority of his classes at the Academy in these languages including three further classes in Latin. He's legit.

jeff_lindqvist wrote:Back in the days of HTLAL, there was a link to a (then recent) radio interview in Spanish.

That can be found right here; the Spanish segment is approximately half-way through (going off memory here).
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Mon May 29, 2023 5:52 pm

Vordhosbn wrote:That can be found right here; the Spanish segment is approximately half-way through (going off memory here).


Thanks!

The English part begins around 20:19 and goes for a couple of minutes, then the Spanish part is announced around 50:10.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Mon May 29, 2023 6:07 pm

Linguistic Meditations in Nature:


Duration: 6:14
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby lingohot » Mon May 29, 2023 7:51 pm

jeff_lindqvist wrote:
Vordhosbn wrote:That can be found right here; the Spanish segment is approximately half-way through (going off memory here).


Thanks!

The English part begins around 20:19 and goes for a couple of minutes, then the Spanish part is announced around 50:10.


I think his Spanish is very fluent, I can't judge about his grammar or choice of vocabulary, but for someone who - as far as I know - has never lived in a Spanish speaking country for a prolonged period of time, I find it impressing.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby Kraut » Sat Jun 03, 2023 8:12 pm

Here is a book review by Arguelles that deals with the use of the mother tongue in the foreign language classroom.


/.../
In sum, this is an extremely important work that anyone interested in or involved with
FL learning should read, as it challenges many commonly held values and assumptions.
This book is an invaluable resource for a plethora of diverse teaching techniques that, if
widely implemented, could very well actually bring about a general paradigm shift in FL
teaching

https://doi.org/10.1177/00336882100410030802
--------------
The Bilingual Reform 2009
A Paradigm Shift in Foreign Language Teaching

Wolfgang Butzkamm, Prof. Dr. John A. W. Caldwell

https://www.lehmanns.de/shop/schulbuch- ... ual-reform

Publisher:
With this book, change has come to foreign language teaching. The mother tongue taboo, which has been the perceived didactical correctness for so many years and in so many countries, is swept away. At the same time, this book combines theory with practice, advice and guidance to teachers. Since the mother tongue issue touches upon all the major domains of teaching - vocabulary, grammar, texts, communication, emotional aspects - a new synthesis of theory and practice has been developed. An invaluable resource both for the novelty and diversity of the teaching techniques presented and for the clarity of its writing.


from the book
Introduction: A red card for the mother tongue?
....
This was the stick to coerce them into making the necessary effort, whether to go
abroad for the appropriate language immersion, or to stay at home and apply them-
selves with the required diligence, discipline and jolly hard work through continuing
education. “English-only” became a badge of honour among EFL teachers, and MT
free lessons almost a religious principle for those who were capable of teaching in this
way.
Add to this that the best teachers tend to get the best teaching conditions: selective
schools, the best classes in the form, senior classes where monolingual teaching is easi-
est. These teachers, of course, are largely those with superior outcomes in their own
language study, better application to their continuing L2 education, significant, benefi-
cial experiences of immersion and so on. In such circumstances, where they habitually
lead their pupils to superior L2 achievement, they are unlikely to see the need for any
radical change, in line with the old adage, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. With students of
superior ability, high motivation to succeed and the mental agility to handle the chal-
lenges of monolingualism, these teachers have little incentive further to analyze and
reflect on their teaching or experiment with other approaches. When confronted with
other levels of ability and lower attainment in their students, they may attribute the
difficulties simply to the quality of the students themselves.
We are often so walled in by our past experiences that we are unable to emerge to
the challenge of the new.
These superior practitioners also are naturally the ones who end up as the pro-
fession’s leaders: teacher educators, inspectors, applied linguists, members and chairs
of examination boards and curriculum and syllabus committees, leaders of language
teachers’ professional organisations, leaders of workshops, speakers at conferences,
writers of journal articles and authors. The monolingual approach has become a matter
of faith with them, deep faith. It is little wonder that for a long time the main voices
heard and heeded have been those that advocate monolingual teaching – with or with-
out the usual concessions. Whenever the MT is mentioned there is a neurotic fear that
incompetent teachers, so embarrassing to the profession, are involved, that the dams
will break and the MT will pour into the FL classrooms. Since a profession needs to see
itself as well-trained and competent, we believe that the profession has fallen victim to
a huge historical neurosis.
Why else should a self-crippling mistake have held sway for such a long time? What
teachers need is a near-native proficiency in the FL, but definitely not a mother tongue
phobia. It bears repeating: The baby has been thrown out with the bathwater.

Last edited by Kraut on Sat Jun 03, 2023 8:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby tastyonions » Sat Jun 03, 2023 8:34 pm

Kraut wrote:Here is a book review by Arguelles that deals with the use of the mother tomgue in the foreign language classroom.

The author of the book, Butzkamm, wrote a quite interesting 2003 article dealing with the same subject:

"We only learn language once. The role of the mother tongue in FL classrooms: death of a dogma": https://www.ittmfl.org.uk/modules/teach ... per1a4.pdf (PDF file)
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby tastyonions » Sat Jun 03, 2023 8:40 pm

Another interesting excerpt from the intro of the book:
However, this book goes far beyond the language of instruction debate. It develops the idea that, in a deep sense, we only learn language once. It is vitally important that we absorb the implications of this fact. Our first language lays the foundation for all other languages we might want to learn. Rather than a liability, it is the most valuable resource, indeed the critical one, that a talking child brings to the classroom. With this acknowledgement, a cardinal error which has crippled foreign language teaching (FLT) all too long, is rectified: the absence of effective bilingual techniques in the FL classroom, which had been banished from the classroom due to the general suspicion surrounding the use of the MT. From this point on “new avenues are opened for language teaching which involve the active, systematic use of the MT” (Cook 2001, 418). It is this systematic positive use of the MT within the framework of a modern communicative approach using the FL which is the basic thread running through all chapters.

This book, then, is not another plea for a flexible and less rigid attitude towards the use of the MT. Such a common sense approach would be just one more uneasy and muddled compromise. Being more relaxed about MT use in certain pedagogic situations, as is often recommended on pragmatic grounds, is not enough, and can even be counterproductive. It is vital that the fundamental powers of the MT, both explanatory and productive, be fully exposed and exploited.

For more than a century, the MT has often been admitted as a last resort only, a kind of fire extinguisher in case of emergency, to clarify tricky meanings and facilitate grammatical explanations. Against such a reduced view, we want to advance a quite rich understanding of the role of the MT. Foreign languages piggyback on L1. Primary school children have accumulated an immense charge and reservoir of pragmatic, semantic and grammatical meanings which must be transferred to the target language. If learners didn’t do this mostly intuitively and, in the main, all by themselves, FLT would be a hopeless undertaking. Bilingual techniques which tease out these skills in order to support the FL are here considered to be central techniques that all teachers should learn to master. This means the prevailing orthodoxy which rides roughshod over learners’ deeply felt needs has to be aggressively torn down and FLT put back on the most solid of foundations. The MT is the bedrock on which any subsequent language learning must be built, not only because it provides ready access to FL meanings, but because it is the magic key that unlocks the door to FL grammars – a fact that has been widely ignored.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Tue Jun 20, 2023 6:18 pm

Question & Answer Page Active Again:


Duration: 1:53
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby cito » Wed Jun 21, 2023 12:01 pm

For anyone wondering about his credentials you can look at his LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-arguelles-3799756?original_referer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F
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