“Understanding is the result of facts acquiring meaning for the learner:
To grasp the meaning of a thing is to see it in its relations to other things: to see how it operates or functions, what uses it can be put to. The relation of means consequence is the center and heart of all understanding.”


When I read this, I immediately thought about the idea of Teaching in context. Again we can see the importance of teaching a language as a whole and by no means as isolated items or grammar formulas as it was thought in the past.
Reasons? Very simple, if we teach pieces of language for our students to memorize, we are developing empty knowledge and not meaningful understanding.




“Doing something correctly, therefore, is not by itself, evidence of understanding: It might have been an accident . TO UNDERSTAND IS TO HAVE DONE IT IN THE RIGHT WAY,OFTEN REFLECTED IN BEING ABLE TO EXPLAIN WHY A PARTICULAR SKILL, APPROACH,OR BODY OF KNOWLEDGE IS OR IS NOT APPROPRIATE IN A PARTICULAR SITUATION.

Of course, a student can memorize thousand of words, formulas or whatever you ask him to, and if you do that, you will possibly also test all those items and mark them.
But what for? That student can easily get a 7, since he memorized everything just as you taught him, but is he going to be able to use those items in situations different from the ones that appeared in his text book? (If any), I don’t think so.



Understanding is about TRANSFER, to be truly able requires the ability to transfer our knowledge effectively involves the capacity to take what we know and use it creatively ,fluently ,in different settings, ON OUR OWN.
That requires an education in how to plug in specific facts or formulas.

On our own, those are the key words. If we want autonomous individuals, with ideas and opinions, critical thinkers able to agree or disagree and willing to express intelligent and coherent ideas then we have to train them on how to use the abilities learned in previous experiences when facing new challenges, in other words, how to TRANSFER.
This concept also reminded me of my neurolinguistic classes in pregrado and the empty slots to be filled with new info. transferred from our mother tongue. That was always an interesting topic for me and now that I find it again here, I am more convinced that teaching English is far beyond teaching about English.







Evidence of misunderstanding is incredibly valuable to teachers, not a mere mistake to be corrected. It signifies an attempted and plausible but unsuccessful transfer. The challenge is to reward the try without reinforcing the mistake or dampening future transfer attempts
Error analysis is a very interesting field that is not very often approached by teachers.

Our student’s errors are a precious source of information for us, again, remembering linguistics in pregrado I was thinking about this concept of “overgeneralization” that I found pretty fascinating. For example, a student thinking that “fishes” is the plural for “ fish” is over generalizing the rule for plurals, that can be considered an error, but if you think about it, the student IS transferring previous knowledge, so the mechanism in his brain is in fact working, so we have to feel satisfied with it and help him internalize the concept of exceptions then.
Pretty interesting……