MSI Press Blog

Excerpt from Practices That Work by Thomas Jesus Garza.  Be Sensitive to Learning Styles   Betty Lou Leaver (Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center) Madeline Ehrman (Foreign Service Institute) Teachers working with language learners at all levels have for some decades now recognized that learners have specific sensory and cognitive preferences when it comes to learning and specific ways of interacting with classmates. These individual differences can be very important both in positive and negative ways in the language process, the significance of which may change as one progresses up the ladder of proficiency. One phenomenon that has been observed by language teachers and their learners over time is the “tortoise and hare” syndrome. Learners who are painfully accurate—and therefore slow— in the beginning of language study often outdistance their faster peers who can plateau at the Advanced/Superior threshold because they have become comfortable with being

  Today (October 24) is the anniversary of Madeline E. Ehrman' s death in 2015. It seems difficult to believe that seven years have passed since she was sitting with the MSI Press editor, talking about what would be her last (still unpublished, but posthumously planned publication) book, The E&L Construct -- an  instrument , copyrighted at the US Library of Congress in 2002,. The E&L instrumnt identifies neurodiversity preferences that she (the E) designed and validated with Betty Lou Leaver, MSI Press managing editor (the L), when they both worked for US government institutions. The E&L Cognitive Styles Construct is not the first posthumous book that MSI Press has published, nor is it likely to be the last. It is a tribute to Madeline, however, that interest in the instrument has grown and become such that a posthumous book is considered viable. Madeline worked her entire career at the Foreign Service Institute. After she died (from stomach cancer, likely resulting fr