Language learning

Revolution in Yiddish teaching: The New Yiddish Textbook In eynem

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It was nothing less than a revolution that hit the world of Yiddish teaching this summer, when the multimedia Yiddish textbook In eynem (White Goat Press, 2020) was published. For many years, Yiddish students have been studying the language with Uriel Weinreich’s College Yiddish from 1949, or with Selva Zucker’s Yiddish: An Introduction to the Language, Literature and Culture from 1995.

Now, Yiddish students and teachers have a more up-to-date alternative. In eynem is a monumental textbook, counting 800 pages (split up in two volumes), with beautifully illustrated dialogues, word explanations, exercises and texts about Jewish culture. It features a goldmine of material for the first two years of Yiddish studies. A dedicated website offers even more teaching material, e.g. … ↪

How do learners make use of foreign language learning materials?

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How do learners make use of foreign language learning materials? This was the question that I set out to answer in my ph.d. thesis. Along the way, I learned to use to methods for evaluating usability of a product (think-aloud protocols and constructive interaction), learned how to analyze the results quantitatively (which was scary), and found new ways to look at the data qualitatively (conversation analysis). Especially through detailed qualitative analyses of how our study participants made use of the learning materials in our usability test settings, I learned more about the sequential organization of such sessions, how instructions are realized, and how different visual and other aspects of the learning material drafts were made relevant.

In this blog post, … ↪