More Than Just Grammar
September 27th, 2012
On a recent Monday, I asked one of my students how her weekend was. “It was great,” she said. “Last week I really felt like I had a lot on my plate, so I rested on the weekend.” I was elated – not just because I was glad she had been able to relax (which I was; many of our participants don’t often have this luxury with their busy schedules), but because she had used the phrase “to have a lot on your plate,” which we’d learned six months ago. I told her how impressed I was. She smiled, tapped her head, and replied, simply, “I remember.”
In my experience, this is ultimately one of the main goals and great struggles of teaching: trying to ensure that our students remember. We want our participants to not only learn each vocabulary word and grammar point we teach, but also to remember it, so that eventually, they can use it. We ask our students to remember a great deal of information, an...more