The Egg and What's Inside

About the egg.

I funded English Laboratory in 2008. The egg was laid, incubated and hatched there. The fertilization process was very long and drawn out (make of that what you will).

The egg is a model for learning English that repeats the mother tongue process. Like I've said, I learn a lot from kids. It's great to watch them put sounds together, matching tone of voice with visual support to understand that this or that particular sound or sounds mean something; that they cause all those big, hairy people to react. I haven't consulted any studies on this, but my hypothesis is that the first two sounds that most babies use as words are the name for the mother (this could change, gentlemen) and milk or what ever receptacle it comes in.

The baby then starts uttering peripheral words; one here, two there until one day: Zoom! Faster than you can roll up the sleeves of your vest, that baby's mouth takes off and you can't shut it up.

The baby never stresses about mistakes and the adults around it think the quirks are  hilarious; 'I don't wanna wear dat! I wored dat yesterday!' They don't even correct the kid! The kid corrects her or himself when s/he's ready! It's amazing!

Can the process be repeated for L2? There are many issues here, but the two main contenders are socialization and references. 

Socialization can seriously get in the way of 'speaking like a native' with particular cultures. I submit that along with geography and climate, language really is the basis of the socialization process. The way a languages treats the combinations of gender, respect, empathy, authority and space in time with different constructions can reveal deep-rooted cultural spins. 

For example, in English we use the 'ing' rarely to describe something we're doing right now but very frequently for something that causes an emotional reaction. 'I'm having lunch with my friends tomorrow' means my heart is filled with joy 'cos me and my peeps will be eating chicken wings on a patio in less than 24 hours. This using of verbal tenses to express something other than a verbal tense is part of the meritocratic anarchy that is English. It makes Anglos gregarious and this is frightening and/or stupid to some cultures. In these cases the hard shell of socialization has to be cracked in order to get to the malleable, fun part . Why did the comedian cross the road? He didn't get the yoke.

References on the other hand are just plain good. 

I learned Spanish in el Mercado de Sant Antonio, Barcelona. Being Canadian, my references were English and French. Thanks to the French I had no problem understanding the concepts of verb conjugations,  feminine & masculine or  backwards adjectives. With vocabulary I started recognizing patterns in the ten dollar word category (metaphor, philosophy). I learned the normal words (table, chair) just by repeating them so many times.

Even something that's not the same or opposite is a good reference, comparing, for example my bicycle with your pogo-stick. 

So, it all goes back to the beginning of an ever-pending story. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Cool!

Hey-ho one and all!

I laid an egg. It was a euphoric experience that drove my husband crazy. Of course I didn't know what was in the darn thing until a little beak started pecking away from inside.

It all started in the fall of 2012 when @Judy Thompson (what a brilliant woman) contacted me through Linked in. Not knowing a thing about me, she invited me to meet with her and some other strays she'd picked up. At that point I'd been involved in ESL for about a decade (at first very unwillingly). 

A decade of trial and error (lot's of error) that grew into a sleep depriving search for the answer: how to teach people English? Guess what, you can't. In fact, you can't teach anything; you can learn it though.

I work with folks of all ages; from 4 months to the end of a completed life cycle. I learned the most from the kids. Kids are great. I can't understand why they don't have the right to vote - they're the ones who should be running this silly planet. 

Anyway, back to the egg. Inside the egg I found the most beautiful model to learn English (+ probably any other language, for that matter) and for me to reach my goal of retiring with my house paid off and enough money to travel around the world to visit my kids, my grandkids and, may I be so fortunate, my great grandkids.

I can hear the bells chiming midnight, so I'm off. Would you believe while I was writing this one of my flip flops broke? Not exactly a glass slipper, but who wants to marry a prince anyway? I'm keeping my meat and potatoes man, thank you very much.

'The worth of that is that which it contains.
And that is this, and this with thee remains.'
- The Second Bill of English Write