Language Teaching Quotes

In the absence of either a widely accepted theory of language learning or a solid empirical base for classroom practice, teachers and learners have always been, and will always be, vulnerable to drastic pendulum swings of fashion, the coming and going of various unconventional and unlamented "Wonder Methods" being an obvious recent example. The sad truth is that after at least 2,000 years, most language teaching takes place on a wing and a prayer - sometimes successfully, but often a relative failure. ~ Michael H. Long

If this letter system works, it should be reproducible and consistent. If this letter system works, it should be demonstrated in biblical narrative - with consistency. It has. It does. It will. For instance: Daniel interpreted the handwriting on the Babylonian wall. (Da 5:1-31) The question has always been, "What method would produce the same interpretation?"
If you will pull out your Strong's Concordance and translate those same four words, you won't get the same results that Daniel got. Was Daniel using a different method than modern Christians? Yes, obviously. ~ Michael Ben Zehabe

A teacher's job is to take a bunch of live wires and see that they are well-grounded. ~ Darwin D. Martin

I have often thought that unselfishness combined in one word more of the teachings of the Bible than any other in the language. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

What immersion has taught us is that comprehensible subject-matter teaching is language teaching - the subject matter class is a language class if it is made comprehensible. In fact, the subject-matter class may even be better than the language class for language acquisition. ~ Stephen D. Krashen

Adam was told to name the animals. Adam studied each kind and gave them a name based on his observations. Every animal "kind" has some behavior or characteristic that is unique to that animal type. When you know the Hebrew name for an animal, you get a peek at how a perfect man, speaking a perfect language, understood that perfect animal. ~ Michael Ben Zehabe

There is a slam-dunk case for extending foreign language teaching to children aged five. Just as some people have taken a perverse pride in not understanding mathematics, so we have taken a perverse pride in the fact that we do not speak foreign languages, and we just need to speak louder in English. ~ Michael Gove

Participating in the filling of others' brains with knowledge and know-how is just an extraordinary gift only very few have. Hence, teaching a language is indeed opening these brains to the world with its similarities and dissimilarities taught in different words. ~ Messaoud Mohammed

Why does life keep teaching me lessons I have no desire to learn? ~ Ashleigh Brilliant

Language is such an imprecise vehicle I sometimes wonder why we bother with it. ~ Karen Joy Fowler

Do you condemn the kids for not having been blessed with I.Q.s of 120? Can you condemn the kids? Can you condemn anyone? Can you condemn the colleges that give all you need to pass a board of education examination? Do you condemn the board of education for not making the exams stiffer, for not boosting the requirements, for not raising salaries, for not trying to attract better teachers, for not making sure their teachers are better equipped to teach?
Or do you condemn the meatheads all over the world who drift into the teaching profession drift into it because it offers a certain amount of paycheck every month security ,vacation-every summer luxury, or a certain amount of power , or a certain easy road when the other more difficult roads are full of ruts?
Oh he'd seen the meatheads, all right; he'd seen them in every education class he'd ever attended. The simpering female idiots who smiled and agreed with the instructor, who imparted vast knowledge gleaned from profound observations made while sitting at the back of the classroom in some ideal high school in some ideal neighborhood while an ideal teacher taught ideal students.
Or the men who were perhaps the worst, the men who sometimes seemed a little embarrassed, over having chosen the easy road, the road the security, the men who sometimes made a joke about the women not realizing they themselves were poured from the same streaming cauldron of horse manure. Had Rick been one of these men? He did not belie ~ Evan Hunter

Bring relevance to the people before teaching them to be believers ~ Sunday Adelaja

Arabic is the language of the Qur'an, but Arab culture is not the culture of Islam. ~ Tariq Ramadan

Reading him was like reading runes - apparently you had to know the language. ~ Rachel Lee

In recent decades we have emphasized the value of teaching people 'tolerance.' Tolerance is not only inadequate, it is a negative concept which only alienates society further. Learning to tolerate absolves people of the responsibility of learning to understand different people, accept and appreciate their differences, and progress towards respecting them for who and what they are. It is only when we build acceptance between people that we will rid ourselves of the scourge of prejudice and liberate ourselves from violence. ~ Arun Gandhi

Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. ~ George Lakoff

You spend your life having lessons, practising and competing as an amateur, and working during the day. As you get to the top end of the amateur field, you try not to work anymore; you earn your living through dancing, maybe by doing a bit of teaching. It's an ongoing life's work. ~ Anton Du Beke

Please search among your staffs and find me an expert on Russia. Find me someone who speaks the language, who is up-to-date on his internal politics, and who understands the Tsar. Find me someone who can think like a Russian. I can't stress how critical it is to find such a person. I need this man to prepare me for the peace talks, and I need him soon. Please notify me directly when such a man is identified."
President Theodore Roosevelt in 'Moryak ~ Lee Mandel

I may fight the British ruler, but I do not hate the English or their language. In fact, I appreciate their literary treasures. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

What is there to say about love ? You could sweep up all the words and stack them in the gutter and love wouldn't be any different, wouldn't feel any different, the hurt in the heart, the headachy desire that hardly submits to language. What we can't tame we talk about. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Orcs only know one language. Blood. I'm the fucking alphabet. ~ Kurtis J. Wiebe

The difficulty of learning the dead languages does not arise from any superior abstruseness in the languages themselves, but in their being dead, and the pronunciation entirely lost. It would be the same thing with any other language when it becomes dead. The best Greek linguist that now exists does not understand Greek so well as a Grecian plowman did, or a Grecian milkmaid; and the same for the Latin, compared with a plowman or a milkmaid of the Romans; and with respect to pronunciation and idiom, not so well as the cows that she milked. It would therefore be advantageous to the state of learning to abolish the study of the dead languages, and to make learning consist, as it originally did, in scientific knowledge. ~ Thomas Paine

It is not clear who will bring to the Whitehouse those useful commodities of vivid language, a sense of history and most important - a sense of humour, but Johnson himself will provide many other attributes. He is effective precisely because he is so determined, industrious, personal and even humourless, particularly in dealing with Congress. ( ... ) Kennedy had a detached and even donnish willingness to grant a merit in the other fellow's argument. Johnson is not so inclined to retreat and grants nothing in an argument, not even equal time. Ask not what you have done for Lyndon Johnson, but what you have done for him lately. This may not be the most attractive quality of the new administration but it works. The lovers of style are not too happy with the new administration, but the lovers of substance are not complaining. ~ Robert A. Caro

M For the time is coming when people will not endure n sound [1] teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, ~ Anonymous

Disruptive technology is a theory. It says this will happen and this is why; it's a statement of cause and effect. In our teaching we have so exalted the virtues of data-driven decision making that in many ways we condemn managers only to be able to take action after the data is clear and the game is over. In many ways a good theory is more accurate than data. It allows you to see into the future more clearly. ~ Clayton Christensen

A foreign language can signify a total separation. It can represent, even today, the ferocity of our ignorance. To write in a new language, to penetrate its heart, no technology helps. You can't accelerate the process, you can't abbreviate it. The ~ Jhumpa Lahiri

My mother had a mantra: musical instrument, foreign language, martial art. ~ E.L. James

Isn't the point of education to teach students how to think, not what to think? ~ Lindsey Whittington

If you let fear of the unknown stop you from taking chances, you will stifle your true potential. ~ Steve Rizzo

A stone, a leaf, an unfound door; a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.
Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
O waste of lost, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this weary, unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again. ~ Thomas Wolfe

Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It's a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people's minds. I'm talking about your language. ~ Mark Pagel

She couldn't quite see herself in it. When they were done, I read the Shakespeare sonnet that begins "Fear no more the heat o' the Sun," partly because it was appropriate to the occasion and one of the most beautiful poems in the language, but also because I hoped it might hide from my loved ones the fact that I myself had nothing to say, that while part of me was here with them on this beloved shore, another part was wandering, as it had been for months, in a barren, uninhabited landscape not unlike the one in my dream. I realized I'd felt like this for a while. Though life had gone on since my mother's death - Kate had gotten married, I'd finally published another book and gone on tour with it - some sort of internal-pause button had been pushed, allowing another part of me, one I'd specifically kept sequestered to deal with my mother, to fall silent. Since her death, Barbara and I had gone through all her things and settled her affairs, but we'd barely spoken of her. ~ Richard Russo

To understand something sufficiently well to be able to program it for a computer does not mean to understand it to its ultimate depth. There can be no such ultimate understanding in practical affairs. Programming is rather a test of understanding. In this respect it is like writing; often when we think we understand something and attempt to write about it, our very act of composition reveals our lack of understanding even to ourselves. Our pen writes the word 'because' and suddenly stops. We thought we understood the 'why' of something, but discover that we don't. We begin a sentence with 'obviously,' and then see that what we meant to write is not obvious at all. Sometimes we connect two clauses with the word 'therefore,' only to then see that our chain of reasoning is defective. Programming is like that. It is, after all, writing, too. But in ordinary writing we sometimes obscure our lack of understanding, our failures in logic, by unwittingly appealing to the immense flexibility of a natural language and to its inherent ambiguity... An interpreter of of programming-language-texts, a computer, is immune to the seductive influence of mere eloquence... A computer is a merciless critic. ~ Joseph Weizenbaum

A self-taught man usually has a poor teacher and a worse student. ~ Henny Youngman

Children from humble families must be taught how to command just as other children must be taught how to obey. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Given the professionalism of Michigan teachers, I think they're not teaching because of the financial rewards. ~ John Engler

At eight, I made a commitment to poetry. Until then, I thought I'd be a policeman. But I went a whole night without sleeping, and the next day the world had changed. It needed a different language. ~ Alice Oswald

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new ... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America. ~ June Jordan