MSI Press Blog

  This week's editor's choice: Practices That Work: Bringing Learners to Professional Proficiency in World Languages , edited by Professor Thomas Jesús Garza and written by a wide range of experts who have helped hundreds of students reach near-native levels of proficiency. Book Description: The many and varied demands of the digital age require cadres of professionals capable of collaborating effectively and engaging globally in the world's languages and cultures. This volume represents a collection of classroom- and field-tested practices used to prepare global professions to the highest standards of proficiency in their languages in order to meet these global challenges. Culled from faculty of government, private, and state educational programs, these "practices that work" offer the language practitioner a selection of "recipes" for helping language learners attain near-native professional proficiency. The techniques and practices offered in these pag...

    Salinas, California After my years with the Army and the State Department, I accepted a position at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. For a linguist, the peninsula was paradise — so many languages, so many chances to practice. But I couldn’t afford to live there anymore. Thirteen years earlier, as a military Russian student, I had managed just fine. Now, housing costs had soared beyond reach. The nearest realistic place to live was Salinas. Salinas is well known to readers of Steinbeck. He was born here, and his childhood home still stands, along with a museum honoring his legacy. Yet, the Salinas of Steinbeck’s novels is not the Salinas of today — layered, complex, and deeply human. The modern Salinas has a high proportion of Spanish speakers, including our landlord at the time, whose wife and I communicated in what could only be called Spanglish . Anna would begin in English, slip into Spanish at the first unknown word, and soon we were to...

  Every field has its heresies. Not the dramatic kind — the quiet ones. The ideas that arrive early, before the world is ready. The approaches that don’t fit the familiar grooves. The innovations that ask people to rethink what they believe they already understand. These ideas rarely receive a warm welcome. Their fate is almost always the same: misunderstood, mistrusted, minimized, or rejected — until the day they are suddenly “obvious.” That is the fate of the new. In this case, Open Architecture Curricular Design. When a New Method Violates Old Assumptions OACD is not widely known. It challenges several deeply embedded beliefs about how languages “should” be taught: It allows learners to make meaningful choices about materials and pathways. It does not rely on a single textbook as the spine of instruction. It rejects the idea that L2 learning is linear, predictable, or identical for all learners. It treats variation as the starting point, not the problem. For many teachers, thes...