MSI Press Blog

  If you’ve been following this blog, you know we often come back to the idea of tortoises and hares in language learning—a metaphor that helps illuminate key differences between learners at lower and higher levels of proficiency. The tortoises are those who are ectenic —once called "left-brain dominant"—methodical, detail-focused, accuracy-driven, and often painfully slow to speak at first. The hares, on the other hand, are synoptic —formerly known as "right-brain dominant"—big-picture thinkers who race through the early stages with apparent ease and fluency, sometimes at the cost of precision. Tortoises and Hares: Cognitive Differences at Work At lower levels of language proficiency, these two types of learners are easy to spot. The hares appear to be naturals, picking up conversational skills quickly, confidently guessing at meaning, and chatting away with barely a pause. Tortoises, meanwhile, may seem stuck in the slow lane—hesitant, quiet, and consumed by get...

  It is Tuesday. Time to tall turkey. Monday's madness is over, and Wednesday will take us over the hump, so Tuesday it is for some serious discussion with authors. Tuesday talks mean to address authors in waiting and self-published authors who would like to go a more traditional route or who would at least like to take their steps with a publisher by their side. Today's topic  is a look at the life cycle of books -- how they differ, how do you define "success" and "failure," and what authors can expect over a lifetime. Here at MSI Press, we have seen a variety of paths taken by successful books (and ones that have not fared as well). For lack of better nomenclature, I would say that we have hares, tortoises, dogs, cats, and mountain goats.  Hares As in the fable, the hares start out fast. These books have strong launches, sell hundreds of books in the first few weeks (from a larger press, these might show up as thousands of sales) and then, quite suddenly s...

  Most of us know the classic fable of the tortoise and the hare: the quick and confident hare bursts ahead, only to tire out, while the slow but steady tortoise trudges forward and eventually wins the race. What if I told you this same dynamic plays out in language learning? According to research by Leaver (1986) with diplomat students at the Foreign Service Institute, learners tended to follow one of these two paths based on their learning styles, as measured by the Torrance Test of Hemisphericity (left-brain learners and right-brain learners). The left-brain learners, referred to by Leaver as tortoises, started slowly, and plodded along with multiple short-term plateaus. These were the same types of learners who tested as ectenic on the later-developed, more sophisticated E&L Cognitive Styles Construct tool. The right-brain learners, referred to as hares, skipped merrily off, without plateauing, until reaching the pre-professional level, and then they reached a very long pla...

  In earlier posts, we’ve talked about hares and tortoises in language learning—those classic learner types who approach fluency either in a burst of brilliance or with deliberate, measured steps. Today, let’s revisit the hares, particularly those who have found a comfortable resting place at Level 3, or “Professional Proficiency,” and seem quite happy to stay there. Hares, often synoptic, right-brain dominant learners , shoot ahead in language acquisition. They become impressively fluent very quickly. They can talk around vocabulary gaps with creative circumlocutions. They can paraphrase on the fly, improvise idioms, and charm listeners with their expressive energy. But what happens when the hare, having outpaced the tortoise in reaching Level 3, falls asleep just shy of the finish line ? This, as Ehrman points out in Developing Professional-Level Foreign Language Proficiency (Leaver & Shekhtman), is the phenomenon of level  fossilization . (There are other forms o...