MSI Press Blog

  Precerpt (excerpt prior to publication from the forthcoming memoir, In with the East: A Mary Poppins Kind of Life by Dr. Betty Lou Leaver Chapter One: Acton I was born in Rochester, New Hampshire, but my earliest memories belong to East Rochester—a small mill town that felt big to a child on a bike. I spent my early years pedaling down its streets, ducking in and out of the Main Street shops, and playing games on the lawns of the two churches that sat directly across from each other like old, watchful neighbors. Back then, life was as local as it gets. I knew every sidewalk crack and shortcut path, every neighbor’s barky dog, and every familiar bell above a shop door. But as our family grew—eight children in all—my father couldn’t support us on a town lot alone. So we moved across the Salmon Falls River to Acton, Maine, where land was cheap and farms were many. That’s the place I truly think of as my childhood home, the place that shaped my bones and burned the soles of my feet ...

Precerpt (excerpt prior to publication) from My 20th Language by Betty Lou Leaver, Ph.D. -- Introduction In the interest of full disclosure, I am not a polyglot—although I have formally and informally studied twenty languages, the most recent being Indonesian, which I undertook over a three-week period at the age of seventy-four. After this intensive study, I spent four weeks in Indonesia conducting faculty development in English for limited English speakers at a government institution. During my time there, I found myself needing Indonesian in countless practical situations: communicating with drivers, navigating train stations between Bandung and Jakarta, checking into hotels, and—perhaps most memorably—combining various nouns with "tidak berfungsi" (does not work) when dealing with hotel staff in Bandung. I helped my co-teacher order at restaurants, asked for directions (or more typically, how to get back to where I started, given my exceptional directional challenges),...

    Coming soon!  Managing Cognitive Distortions and Mitigating Affective Dissonance  by Salyer and Leaver. Watch for it! Book Description: Unlock the Mind. Empower the Learner. Transform Language Education. Why do capable students fail to thrive in language classrooms? Why do smart learners sabotage their own progress with unproductive thoughts and emotions?  Managing Cognitive Distortions and Mitigating Affective Dissonance  offers educators and learners alike a groundbreaking framework for identifying and dismantling the hidden psychological barriers that block language acquisition. Drawing on decades of fieldwork and research, this unique collaboration between educator Dr. Betty Lou Leaver and psychologist Dr. Shannon Salyer explores how distorted thinking and unresolved emotional tension quietly derail learning success. With insights shaped by extensive experience at premier institutions like the Foreign Service Institute and the Defense Language Insti...