Author: Santiago

By age four, most humans have developed an ability to communicate through oral language. By age six or seven, most humans can comprehend, as well as express, written thoughts. These unique abilities of communicating through a native language clearly separate...

Traditional approaches used to treat foreign language teaching and learning as a package of knowledge that needed to be analysed and observed, as successive series of rules –mostly grammatical - that needed to be learnt before moving on to further sets of...

The art of writing was a professional skill. By 1700, Europe's literacy rate ranged from 30 to 40 percent; by 1850, it was 50 to 55 percent; and by the second half of the 19th century writing became a basic qualification in human societies. Today...

Although Mandarin Chinese is the language spoken by the largest number of people, English is spoken in all continents, and therefore, it is the most widespread language on earth: It is the language spoken in the British Isles, North America, Australia and New Zealand...

Language is a system of gestures, grammar, signs, sounds, symbols, or words, used to represent and communicate concepts, ideas, meanings, and thoughts. The study of language as such a code is called linguistics, an academic discipline which runs along two major...

First of all, we need to mention the natural order in which children learn their mother tongue, as this natural order is usually taken into account when teaching a second or foreign language: Babies or very young infants listen to the sounds they hear without...