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 to speak, for personal pleasure

  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 been giving a dressing down to