TEFLology Podcast TEFL Interviews 21: Shawn Loewen on Instructed Second Language Acquisition

(TEFLology Podcast)

The new episode of TEFLology is up here.

In my original review of this podcast, I mentioned that while the individual episodes could be hit or miss, the interviews were always pure gold.

And this one was pure gold.  A fascinating discussion with Shawn Loewen.

My only complaint was that it was too short.  I wanted it to be much longer.  Shawn Loewen touches on a number of fascinating points, but doesn't get indepth on any of them.

(At one point in the interview, Shawn Loewen asks "How are we doing on time?"  And I thought to myself: Why are they worried about time?  It's a podcast.   They're no time limits on a podcast, right? They should just talk for as long as they can, and not worry about keeping to a time limit...
..Although actually now that I think about it, the question could have referred to external time constraints, e.g. they might have had to go to wrap up the talk to go to the next session of the seminar, or something like that.)

As always, I don't have any coherent organized thoughts on this podcast, but I do have a lot of random thoughts.

* Shawn Loewen is teaching at Michigan State, so that's a nice little Michigan connection there.

* It turns out Shawn Loewen's mentor is Rod Ellis--for my review of Rod Ellis's book, see here.

*  The Japanese public education system gets a bad rap for failing to teach English in a communicative way to their students.
(When I was an Assistant English Teacher in Japan, we ALTs used to complain constantly to each other about how bad the  Japanese English education system was.)
So it's interesting to hear Shawn Loewen say that all the same problems seem to exist in American schools.
(Despite being an American myself, my experience with foreign language education in America is limited.  I took Latin when I was a high school and college student, which was a dead language and was taught like a dead language.  I always assumed that living languages were taught differently, but the picture Shawn Loewen paints of Spanish education in the US indicates that it's not.)
This is interesting if true.  We've known since the 1950s that traditional grammar instruction does not lead to communicative competence.  (Krashen detailed the history of foreign language instruction in his book The Natural Approach).