Quotes About Language Teaching

#1. What immersion has taught us is that comprehensible subject-matter teaching is language teaching - the subject matter class is a language class if it is made comprehensible. In fact, the subject-matter class may even be better than the language class for language acquisition.

Stephen D. Krashen

#2. The structure of this material does not follow standard European language teaching style. The Cherokee language is too different from any European language to be able to follow such a style. Cherokee is a language of description and of relationship.

Michael Joyner

#3. The great minds, the great works transcend all limitations of time, of language, and of race, and the scholar can never feel initiated into the company of the elect until he can approach all of life's problems from the cosmopolitan standpoint.

William Osler

#4. [About describing atomic models in the language of classical physics:]
We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.

Niels Bohr

#5. The Pharisees deliberately avoided the Late form of Biblical Hebrew (LBH), which is the language of the Bible written after the exile, presenting their teaching in the language of the spoken vernacular.

Angel Saenz-Badillos

#6. I have often thought that unselfishness combined in one word more of the teachings of the Bible than any other in the language.

Theodore Roosevelt

#7. new strategies in teaching and learning English language

Wilga Rivers

#8. When language was not transcendental enough to complete the meaning of a revelation, symbols were relied upon for heavenly teaching, and familiar images, chosen from the known, were made to mirror the unknown spiritual truth.

William H. Hunt

#9. I did three DVD's for 'Baby Einstein,' teaching babies how to sign. It really helps a parent communicate because babies can't talk. But it has been proven that they can communicate using their hands to communicate. So sign language is a great tool in that way.

Marlee Matlin

#10. I work from the body - I try to develop a language of the body. I've invented a term I call "corporeal writing" around that idea. I love teaching and collaborating around this idea, because no new breakthrough in literature ever happened because everyone was doing what was already there.

Lidia Yuknavitch

#11. Somehow, we were passing the boundaries of language and finding clarity in shared thought, even if we were just talking about beer!

Gerry Abbey

#12. The bad preacher takes the ideas of our own age and tricks them out into the traditional language of Christianity. The core of his thought is merely contemporary; only the superficies is traditional. But your teaching must be timeless at its heart and wear modern dress.

C.S. Lewis

#13. Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savor their songs.

Nelson Mandela

#14. For me, the reputation for teaching language in general, and East European languages most particularly, gave Glasgow University, and by reflection the country, a distinction.

Tom Stoppard

#15. One barrier ... is the impoverishment of classroom language, the failure to cultivate a common vocabulary about inquiry, explanation, argument and problem solving.

David Perkins

#16. The idea is that when the teaching begins to happen, it is an experience - but experience needs language, and at the same time, language needs experience.

Chogyam Trungpa

#17. All the teaching I had ever received had failed to make me apply such intelligence as I was possessed of, directly and vividly: there had never been any sunshine, as regards language, in the earlier grey days of learning, for the sky had always pelted with gerunds and optatives.

E.F. Benson

#18. You don't have to be Michelangelo to teach basic art, just as you don't have to be Shakespeare to be able to teach the correct use of language.

Charles De Lint

#19. Having replaced instinct with language, society, and culture, we are the only species that depends on teaching and learning. We aren't human without them. In them is true power. But are they the occupations of the rich and mighty?

Ursula K. Le Guin

#20. My task as a language arts teacher is to provide texts that are not so difficult that my students shut down in frustration and not so easy that my students don't push their thinking.

Kimberly Hill Campbell

#21. My parents were language teachers. They talked about teaching all the time and all their friends were teachers. It was considered a pre-ordained thing that I would go into teaching.

Joanne Harris

#22. The reading of great books has been a life-altering activity to me and, for better or worse, brought me singing and language-obsessed to that country where I make my living. Except for teaching, I've had no other ambition in life than to write books that mattered.

Pat Conroy

#23. Participating in the filling of others' brains with knowledge and know-how is just an extraordinary gift only very few have. Hence, teaching a language is indeed opening these brains to the world with its similarities and dissimilarities taught in different words.

Messaoud Mohammed

#24. When my principal interviews candidates for a teaching position at my school, regardless of whether it's a language arts position, he always asks them to discuss the last book they read.

Donalyn Miller

#25. But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself,into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously ...

Julio Cortazar

#26. And so we went. And so it went. And, slowly, I began to learn: speaking in the same language does not equal communication, especially when there is a cultural divide.

Gerry Abbey

#27. It is no secret that the fruits of language study are in no sort of relation to the labour spent on teaching and learning them.

Edward Sapir

#28. Theologians sometimes have spoken of the "impassibility of God;" namely that God could not be capable of emotions, of either joy and pleasure or pain and grief.237 But this goes beyond the language and teaching of the Scripture.

Timothy J. Keller

#29. Exploring microhistories, cultural history can "track the changing interplay among schools of thought and language patronage and power of financing and control, teaching traditions and elites," that is, make us aware of the discursive workings of power.

Martin Prochazka

#30. His older self had taught his younger self a language which the older self knew because the younger self, after being taught, grew up to be the older self and was, therefore, capable of teaching.

Robert A. Heinlein

#31. Let's take some extra time to talk about one: Only the number one can create all numbers with this simple equation, 111111111 x 111111111 = 12345678987654321. One, expressed nine times, multiplied by itself, produces all subsequent numbers progressively and then inversely. Zero is not a number.

Michael Ben Zehabe

#32. My being a teacher had a decisive influence on making language and systems as simple as possible so that in my teaching, I could concentrate on the essential issues of programming rather than on details of language and notation.

Niklaus Wirth

#33. If you're teaching, say, physics, there's no point in persuading a student that you're right. You want to encourage them to find out what the truth is, which is probably that you're wrong.

Noam Chomsky

#34. What are your drawn to?"
...
"Language, Words, No, not teaching. Perhaps one day I'll write something.

Ellen Sussman

#35. I take a real interest in the possibilities of teaching - including the practice of bringing creative writing, and serious reading, into the classroom. I am persuaded that since language is alive, much of the challenge has already been met by the poets and novelists we read.

Michael Cadnum