language teaching | John Canning

I am delighted to announce that my new website Yazikopen is now online. Yazikopen links to over 1000 articles into teaching and learning languages. All these articles are open access—in other words they are free to view wherever you are in the world.

Most academic articles online require a subscription to view or require the reader to purchase the articles individually (£25 for a 16 page pdf document is not unusual). I am fortunate to work at a large university which subscribes to a wide range of paid-for journals, but I hope that Yazikopen will be especially valuable to researchers who do not have access to subscription journals. The expense of most journals makes them out of reach of most school teachers as well as researchers and students working in smaller or poorer institutions, independent (or job-seeking) researchers and individuals in countries where library resources are very limited.

Someone has to pay for research somewhere along the line. In some cases the authors pay a publication fee so that their article can be made open access. In the case of other journals there is no fee—the people who run the journal donate their time freely, or their time is paid for by their employers. Yazikopen contains links to both sorts of open access materials. Most importantly Yazikopen helps the people who will benefit most to access research. It is a sorry state of affairs when teachers cannot access research which would help them to become better teachers and academics, researchers and students are unable to access research available to their peers.

Please take a look at the Yazikopen website. It is still a work ‘in progress’—not all the items are keyworded yet, though the free text research works quite well. Please email me admin@yazikopen.org your comments or send to @Yazikopen on Twitter.

Browsing through a 75-year-old edition of the Modern Language Journal, I came across this article entitled “Ten Commandments and One More in Modern Foreign Language Teaching” by Harry Kurtz of the University of Nebraska.

His ten tips are:

1. Thou shalt make every student recite every day.

2. Thou shalt make thy questions shorter and distribute them more frequently to the unworthy of thy flock.

3. Thou shalt demand written home-work for every lesson as an evidence of individual effort.

4. Thou mayest spare thy strength in the marking of these by having them corrected in class, but thou shalt collect them and check them off on the rolls.

5. Thou shalt refrain from personal eloquence in the classroom.

6. Remember that the strained silence of pupils thinking is worth more than volubility, thine or theirs.

7. Thou shalt plan thy hour and mark thy pages beforehand, so that never, no never, shalt thou ask thy sheep on what page they stopped grazing the last time.

8. Thou shalt have thy watch before thee to guide thee in the passing of time and to guard thee from over-stressing one thing at the cost of another. So shalt thou finish the assignment and never have the ignominy of covering less than what was imposed upon the fold.

9. Thou shalt watch thy pupils' thoughts as reflected in their faces and hurl the thunder of a question where it may be necessary to recall the straying.

10. And last, so shalt thou prosper and discover the best devices in language teaching in the measure that thou wilt insist upon work and get it.

Harry Kurz, “Ten Commandments and One More in Modern Foreign Language Teaching,” The Modern Language Journal 20, no. 5 (February 1, 1936): 288-293. Full article available from JSTOR.

John Canning

Thoughts on higher education, academic development, sustainability, languages, statistics, humanities, free software, e-learning and more

Tag Archives: language teaching

Free open access research into teaching and learning languages