From Theory to Practice
Now, what you’ve all been waiting for… let’s get into the nitty-gritty. In the next four chapters, we will take a look at each of the four “skill” areas of language learning (listening, speaking, reading, and writing).
In addition to having introductions and conclusions, each of the chapters includes three core sections:
- The first section for each chapter proposes a set of guiding principles for language learners to create and adopt ways to learn and use that skill.
- The second section provides a brief overview of some of the theory and research that support the principles in the first section.
- The third section offers examples of practical strategies for learning the skill (either listening, speaking, reading or writing) to give you inspiration and ideas for your own learning. These are not an exhaustive list of strategies! We hope you will come up with some of your own strategies, and in future editions of this book we will continue adding strategies from new cohorts of students.
Keep an eye out! Some of the example strategies are accompanied by personal stories in the forms of videos, poems, art, and other creative forms contributed by students from the LING 144 class. These students show how they experienced change in their language learning approaches as they implemented the principles and strategies in their own lives.
But first, let’s pause to remind ourselves in the next section how these four skills are actually interdependent and integrated most of the time in real-life practice.
