In this article, the author talks about academic jibberish. Alfie Kohn states that a great deal of academic writing is incomprehensible even to others in the same area of scholarship. Academic Jibberish may score points for the writer but does not help research or practice. The author discusses jibberish as a career strategy that impresses those…

The recent past in language teaching has been dominated by the Skill-Building Hypothesis, the view that we learn language by first learning about it, and then practicing the rules we learned in output. The present is marked by the emergence of the Comprehension Hypothesis, the view that we acquire language when we understand messages, and is also…

Hearing stories can result in considerable incidental vocabulary development, for both first and second language acquisition (e.g. Elley 1992; Robbins and Ehri 1994; Senechal, LeFevre, Hudson and Lawson 1996). It has also been claimed, however, that direct instruction is more effective than incidental vocabulary acquisition and that combining both…