Daily Excerpt: Working with Advanced Foreign Language Students (Shekhtman) - Preface
Excerpt from Working with Advanced Foreign Language Students (Boris Shekhtman) - Preface This little booklet is far weightier than many tomes four times its size. The nuggets of wisdom distilled in it come from more than two decades of extraordinarily successful experience in working with students at the highest levels of foreign-language proficiency. The quality of Boris Shekhtman’s instruction and his insight into advanced students’ learning needs is a subject with which I have had first-hand knowledge year after year. Many years ago, in 1984, Boris, and a colleague, Natalia Lord, approached me, as their supervisor at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), with a request to develop a course for advanced students. Any student who had already reached Superior-level proficiency at that time and was returning to FSI for a refresher or enhancement course, was treated as a tutorial. However, Boris and Natalia saw the possibilities in grouping these students into...