Dr. Anh Nguyễn-Cortez
Anh is an applied linguist and teacher educator with appointments in both Spanish and English-as-a-second-language programs. She came to language teaching through her own bilingual upbringing in a Vietnamese-American family. Her work focuses on learner anxiety, motivation, and what affect actually does inside a language classroom. She writes for LanguagePlans about the affective and cognitive variables that drive who keeps speaking and who quits.
- The affective filter, reconsidered
- Willingness to communicate
- Vocabulary acquisition and spacing
- The critical period debate
4 pieces in the archive.
Why students forget vocabulary, and what the spacing research actually says to do about it.
Your Spanish 2 students could conjugate ser on Friday and could not remember it on Monday. The Quizlet sets are not the problem. The schedule is. Nicholas Cepeda and Henry Roediger spent twenty years showing exactly why.
The affective filter, what forty years of follow-up research did to Krashen's metaphor.
Krashen called it a filter. A wall that goes up between the input and the part of the brain that acquires language. Forty years later we know the wall exists, but it does not work the way the metaphor suggested.
Willingness to communicate, the construct that diagnoses the kid who never speaks.
There is one student in every Spanish class who understands everything and says nothing. Peter MacIntyre and his colleagues spent fifteen years working out why. The construct they built (willingness to communicate) is the most useful diagnostic tool in our field and the one fewest teachers know by name.
The critical period hypothesis, what to actually tell parents who ask if it is too late.
Eric Lenneberg proposed the critical period in 1967. Joshua Hartshorne, Joshua Tenenbaum, and Steven Pinker tested it on two-thirds of a million speakers in 2018. The conclusions you can defend at a parent-teacher conference are not what the popular version suggests.
Meet the rest of the team.
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