MSI Press Blog

  Today's book excerpt comes from  Working with Advanced Foreign Language Students  by Boris Shekhtman . Some Characteristics of Advanced Language Learners  SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF ADVANCED STUDENTS   Student-Language Relations So, what does having an advanced student mean to a teacher? It means, of course, that the student already speaks the foreign language with finesse, that the student already knows the host country pretty well, along with its history and culture, that he or she has seen quite a few foreign language teachers before now. (Typically, the advanced student has studied, if not mastered, several foreign languages [Belcher and Connor, 2001; Leaver and Atwell, 2002] and has already developed his or her own ideas about how to learn a foreign language [Ehrman, 2002; Leaver and Shekhtman, 2002].)  Language Learning Motivation and Goals  The advanced student is extremely motivated; rarely do such students study a language simply, so t...

  Today's book excerpt comes from Working with Advanced Foreign Language Students by Boris Shekhtman . Some Characteristics of Advanced Langauge Learners  SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF ADVANCED STUDENTS    Student-Teacher Relations  Although students may be world-renown politicians, this social function of theirs is muted once they turn to a teacher in order to study a foreign language, for between student and teacher there springs up a special, unique, specific relationship that is characteristic only of the teacher-student relationship. There are several reasons for this.  First, students generally believe in teachers; they trust what teachers will be doing with them. The student, for his or her part, is in the position of a person who is teaching no one, who should himself be taught, who should be listening to someone else.  Second, the student has fallen under the total control of the teacher (whereas only an hour earlier, in some cases, he or she had b...

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...