If you’re a language teacher, you’re probably quite familiar with the concept of recasting, even if you don’t know the name. And if you’re a language learner, being aware of recasting can help you learn faster. So what is recasting?
Fukuya and Zhang define a recast as “implicit corrective feedback.” Another definition of “recast” given by Han Ye in a presentation at the ACTFL 2008 conference was “a native speaker’s corrective reformulation of a student’s utterance.”
It’s not very …
My friend Brad made a guitar out of Chinese bamboo. Behold:
Brad is involved with Tonerider, which “produces electric guitars pickups, bass guitar pickups and handwired guitar effects pedals, designed and priced for working musician.”…
Recently discovered this hilarious video on Youku. Be sure to watch it to the end.
The video appears to be from Taiwan.
This got me thinking… “funny animal videos” (along with “cute baby videos”) belong to a small set of video types which has universal appeal. If you watch funny animal videos on Youku, you’ll notice that most of them come from outside China, and were simply “ported to” (copied and uploaded to) Youku. Obviously, it could go the other …
Ryan of Lost Laowai recently interviewed me for a series he’s doing. He asked some good questions.…
I was helping a Chinese friend with her English, and was very interested to read the following dialogue in her book. (I have preserved the grammar and punctuation of the original, but I didn’t feel like writing “[sic]” everywhere.)
The dialogue:
A: Your English is not like American English.
B: Oh, I see. What I speak is true American English, but it is not standard American English.
A: What kind of English is it?
B: It is Black English.
…
It has been suggested that it’s more useful to teach that the third tone is low rather than dipping. This could help with third tone problems in connected speech. The “model” third tone with a rising tail could then be treated as the exception to the rule. Based on this idea, I created this “perceptual tone diagram.”
You’ve probably heard that tests are a big deal in China, and thus test prep is big business. This applies even to such “un-gameable” forms of tests as free response essay questions. But how do you game the free response portion of an English test?
Well, you memorize a number of essay templates, then just fit your essay answer into one of the templates. All you have to do is plug in a few relevant words and phrases, and …
John has lived in China for
11.5
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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