Teaching a foreign language to first-time learners is hard. Students wonder how they can possibly language the language when they don’t know anything, and teachers grapple with speaking in the target language even when they know their students don’t fully understand. Ultimately, it comes down to setting expectations.

Standardized tests have been both vilified and venerated, and despite their well-documented shortcomings, they are widely used in many high-stakes circumstances. But with the introduction of other measures of proficiency, performance, and assessment, we gain a far more robust picture of a learner’s capabilities.

While translation is a core element of language learning, translation is itself an art, not a means to an end. So where does translation fit into a language learning process which requires personalized, relevant, and meaningful instruction?

You never get a second chance to make a first impression, and unfortunately for many non-native speakers, a foreign accent can sometimes get in the way. It’s one of the first things that people notice, and incomprehensible, heavily-accented English can be used to label and categorize, often wrongly. Language learners understandably want to minimize their accents, but they are rarely successful; let’s consider why.