"If my doctor told me I had only six months to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster." by Isaac Asimov
"Fiction is the truth inside the lie." by Stephen King
"Easy reading is damn hard writing." by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them - then the rest will be valuable." by Mark Twain
"To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement." by Mark Twain
"The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense." by Tom Clancy
"Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything." by Virginia Woolf
"I try to leave out the parts that people skip." by Elmore Leonard
"The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamouring to become visible." by Vladimir Nabokov
I, my, me, myself: I am all these words. However, I am not all of them at the same time. Its use will depend on the linguistic context, the grammatical function in the sentence or even the semantic representation of each of them. The point here is to draw our attention towards the processes whereby we internalise the use of these words by knowing automatically which word fits in a given linguistic context.
I am amazed at the way a second language is acquired. It is fantastic to study all the mechanisms at work when acquiring the mother tongue but it is even more incredible to go into the processes that determine the acquisition of a second language. It study will facilitate our job in the classroom. Let’s have a look at some strategies and tools to improve our teaching activity.
