Often when I mention that I’m an English teacher, people ask me how many languages I know, or how it’s possible to teach English to a multilingual classroom.

Why learning English by reading about it in Portuguese isn’t effective (and vice-versa!)

This is a link to an article on an Brazilian blog about English, shared with me by a Brazilian student. Often when I mention that I’m an English teacher, people ask me how many languages I know, or how it’s possible to teach English to a multilingual classroom. This article is a clear, concise argument for using monolingual material to study a language rather than reading “about” the target language in your own language, but instead, achieving fluency by training your brain to figure out both new grammar rules and new patterns and vocabulary acquired by reading the material in the target language.

I like how the article points out that the mother language is not lost in this process, but, instead, plays an important role in helping the learner understand new patterns and structures.  I know I gained a greater knowledge of English vocabulary and grammatical structures when I learned Italian (English is based partially in Latin, so learning a Latin language helped me learn a lot about my own language).

I always try to emphasize to my students the importance of thinking in English, not translating word-for-word to their mother tongue. It’s for this reason, which I believe is supported by the article, that I throw markers at my students if I catch them speaking their mother language in the English classroom. It’s not at all because I think English is superior (I think the Romance languages are more beautifully sounding, and the Asian languages are more beautifully written anyway), but it’s because I don’t want them to waste their money and time by coming all the way to Boston to think and talk about English in Portuguese.

So, in light of this, can anyone help me find any monolingual material to help me learn Portuguese?

By.dannisima, source.dannisimablog