How
to Think in English in Three Vital Steps: Help Your ESL/EFL
Students Join the Global Community
Leona
Wellington
Paperback:
100 pages
Publisher:
Igo4itnow (July 22, 2018)
Language:
English
How
to Think in English is a light, personalized guide to help ESL / EFL teachers
worldwide. It outlines the framework for the 3 vital steps you need to teach
English to speakers of other languages (TESOL). It covers the obvious about how
English functions at its core level by mapping out the precise order your
ESL/EFL learners need to acquire in order to think as a native speaker would
think. Although it is aimed as a guide for English teachers, it is written in a
simple entertaining style with lots of examples, anecdotes, stories and suggestions
for helping students engage their right brain to acquire this core concept. It
is a fun read for anyone interested in the linguistic aspects of that infamous
language: English (the lingua franca). If you are a native speaker you learned
how to think in English by the time you were two to four years old, as
described by Noam Chomsky, through your “Language Acquisition Device” (LAD)
which he says is hardwired into your brain, despite the “poverty of stimulus”.
In other words, you were able to do this without being taught or without
sufficient examples. But second language learners usually have an entirely
different way of thinking because they come from different language groups that
often have different word orders than English. And when they have the same word
order they have more flexibility to change the order than English does. For
this reason, you need to help your students acquire the specific order for
thinking in English from the very beginning. This book offers suggestions for
accomplishing this task. It contains two specially designed activities that
support the core concept as well as some amusing metaphors (The Three Brother’s
Law and The Accordion Principle) that will help your students remember the
concept. Without acquiring these core concepts your students will not be firmly
grounded in the language. They may learn a lot of grammar and new vocabulary,
but without grounding, when they reach higher levels and must think and perform
beyond their capacity, they may be speaking and writing in English, but
thinking in their own language. This can produce a distorted version of what
they really mean to say. For this reason, re-visiting and reinforcing this
concept is important at all levels. This book is about the heartbeat and rhythm
of the language, something you may have stopped hearing a long time ago but
which your students need to learn so they can march with the beat of the
English language in its succinct personal way of thinking and expressing
itself. Students who have a solid foundation have a good start in mastering
native-like proficiency and can progress to advanced levels while staying in
rhythm with the precise order of English. Although this concept is often
mentioned to learners it is not practiced and emphasized enough to become automatic
for them. There are many activities and exercises which are vital for English
learners in their journey to acquire the language, but the ones in this book
are designed specifically to reinforce the three vital steps for thinking in
English, because these steps underlie any other steps they may subsequently
learn. This book will point out what you know, but didn’t know that you knew.