Über uns

OXBOW LANGUAGE INSTITUTE

Second Language Acquisition, Research and Education

Seminars

-- Our specialty is training teachers to instructor students specific methods in the acquisition of a second language.

-- This sub-specialty is unique. No other firm has tackled the issue of: HOW DO STUDENTS STUDY A FOREIGN LANGUAGE? - instead they focus on training teachers classroom methods only. Teachers have a student for 45 minutes. What happens when the student returns to his dorm or returns home and studies for 3 hours?

-- Educators assume that studying a foreign language is the same as studying history, math or social studies. This is categorically a false assumption. Teachers cannot hand students a grammar book and assume that the student knows how to study a foreign language.

-- "Students don't know how to study." -- Columbia University Press

-- Referring to American University students, Jeffrey Karpicke, Ph.D. Director, The Memory and Cognition Lab, Perdue University said, "Students are losing precious time on ineffective study methods."

-- OXBOW methods solve these problems. Our methods are based on cognitive psychology, meta cognition, corpus linguistics and other current scientific research in memory enhancement.

-- OXBOW seminars are presented in English, French, Spanish, Russian, German, Mandarin,

-- Seminars given in Annecy, France; Thun, Switzerland; Manila, Philippines; Taipei, Taiwan; Kunming, China Second Language Acquisition.

-- OXBOW has a progressive TESL and TESOL certification program as well.

-- Currently working with a literary agent for the publication of the book "A Guidebook for Every Foreign Language".

-- Our specialty is training teachers how to teach students to STUDY a foreign language.

-- Hundreds of firms instruct and train foreign language teachers how to TEACH a foreign language, but to date, no other firm trains teachers how to instruct their students to STUDY a foreign language.

-- This is our unique niche.

-- We are doing what others have failed to do.

-- OXBOW is the only firm certifying teachers in this unique and totally neglected field.

Another aspect of of Language Seminars deals with helping language students and teachers correct deficient language textbooks - which are a major obstacle to learning a language.

-- Below is an excerpt from our book "A Guidebook for every Foreign Language" (now in preparation for publication)

Why do I hate my textbook?

Half the verbs I need are missing!

“These 12 most common lexical verbs are: say, get, go, know, think, see, make, come, take, want, give, and mean. However, 7 of the 12 most common lexical verbs were [completely avoided] by all textbooks in our survey.” [6 textbooks were surveyed including one from Oxford University Press entitled Oxford Practice Grammar (Eastwood, 1992).

These same textbooks also included the wrong verbs. ‘Many textbooks include examples containing relatively low frequency verbs, such as cry, revolve, arrive, touch, travel, read, rain, shine, ring, drive, enjoy, build, rise, smoke, close, grow, kiss, stay, own, taste, cause, and boil.’ Douglas Biber is Regents' Professor of English (Applied Linguistics) at Northern Arizona University.

Do I need to write my own textbook?

NO! Of course not! This guidebook will show you how to correct the problem. It will give you a list of the most common and useful verbs. -- But even more importantly, it will show you how to fix another major flaw. It will teach you how to SIMPLIFY any grammar book in any language. What does this mean?

A universal problem with every grammar book on the market is that the authors complicate things unnecessarily. They add needless words to sentences both when they introduce new grammar and when they give examples of new ideas. The proper way to learn is to simplify, simplify, simplify. This guidebook teaches 14 methods to simplify what is in your workbook, textbook or grammar book: to take an overly complicated sentence and strip it down to a much simpler sentence – while maintaining the exact same grammatical structure.

Here’s just one example of simplification: Your workbook is teaching you the preposition FROM and it gives you the following sentence: “I am learning Japanese FROM Professor Yamamoto.” (This sentence is actually from a workbook!) The problem is that you don’t need the words PROFESSOR, JAPANESE or the proper name YAMAMOTO in order to learn the pronoun FROM.

In this case the workbook added three entirely NEW words to this sentence, adding to your learning load. (No wonder you hate your textbook!) What is the solution? Simply change your workbook from: “I am learning Japanese from Professor Yamamoto,” to “I am learning from him.” Notice that the grammatical structure does not change. You’ve eliminated three unnecessary words. You’ve simplified the sentence. You’ve made your life easier! You’ve made the learning process less miserable! This book has 13 other simplification methods to make learning easier instead of harder!

How is this book different from every other book on the subject? In 11 crucial ways:

It will:

• give you 14 methods to simplify your grammar books and make study easier

• give you 26 study methods to improve your memory and potentiate the language

centers in your brain

It will show you how to:

• study a foreign language effectively so that you can stop “losing precious time”

• achieve 85 to 95% recall of everything you learn – in any language

• speed up the learning acquisition time – of any language

• maximize any workbook or grammar book – in any language

by showing you:

• which words to learn – in every language

• which grammatical sentence structures to learn – in all languages

• which words not to learn – in every language

• learn the Universal Core Language of every language

• determine your most effective learning style

• successfully put language into your Long-Term Memory

Our seminars accomplish all of the above

David Carroll