MSI Press Blog

  excerpt from  How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately  by Boris Shekhtman -  THE ROLE OF COMMUNICATIVE RULES IN TEACHING AND LEARNING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE In learning and teaching second and foreign languages, teachers and students have a number of resources at their fingertips to work with both the “top-down” and “bottom-up” aspects of language acquisition. Textbooks and reference grammars provide us with grammar rules. These are very useful in understanding how the language works and in helping us to make our communication literate. Some textbooks, along with conversation guides and the like, provide us with scripts for generating various kinds of speech acts in various topical domains. We have the weather forecast script, the political meetings-and greetings script, the professional reception script, the business meeting script, and so on and so forth. A very few textbooks (and then only at high levels of proficiency and only in some languages) p...

  Excerpt from How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately: Foreign Language Communication Tools  Definition of Communication Rules  Yet everything discussed above—the acquisition of the language, the knowledge of the language—have nothing to do with communication tools.  Communication tools are the combination of skills which allow a speaker to use most effectively the level of foreign language in his or her command.  To make this definition more clear, let us imagine two groups of students with the same level of knowledge of foreign language. Let us imagine also that these students have come to the host country and are capable of observing the quality of their communication with native speakers. We do not have to have any great imagination to know that the members of the two groups will be quite different one from another and in striking ways. Everyone has seen representatives of each of these groups. So, let’s see what happens with these two ...