Teacher Training

2025-11-13: I was just having a look at the Esukhia Beginning Reader in preparation for teaching it to a new student, and I realized that it might be a good approach to show the tone and aspiration difference during a class by using hand gestures to reinforce the colours used. For the   ཨ་   ཧ་    and    འ་   sounds, indicate the high tone or low tone by pointing up or down with the hand, and indicate non-aspirated versus aspirated by using a pointed index finger (non-aspirated) and a flat hand (aspirated). I'm going to try it out and report back. Feel free to let me know if you find it useful when working with your students. I assume that this new convention will make it easy to demonstrate when you're interacting about spelling of new words (or for any lesson, really, as they can be used easily enough independent of the colours).

2025-11-14: The explanation went well with my student, and I will continue to use the hand gestures going forward to reinforce the learning of tone and aspiration. 

Another idea that I have been developing recently is a way to relate honorifics in Tibetan to the idea of a sort of "honorific" register that we have in English. In essence, we have a base gramatically and with the core functional words in English that come from its German roots. The German-origin words (about a third of our vocabulary) are most often used in the vulgar or common register, and form the glue of most sentences. 

Then we have about a third of vocabulary made up of French-origin words from the Norman period of William the Conqueror from 1066 on, when the royal class in England spoke French and the servants who interacted with them learned and began using many French words. That is why we have two words for many animals and their food products, for example. Cow and beef. Calf and veal. Or for fruits, we borrowed "raisin" for a dried grape. So we can perhaps think of the French words as the "polite" register as a convention for teaching the idea. 

Then another third of our vocabulary comes from Latin. So words like "occlusion", or "obstruction" are used most often in the medical or scientific register, such as when we speak with our doctor. I have begun explaining this especially when teaching English to Tibetan people to help them understand that we do indeed have a sort of honorific system in English as well, and it is this morning that I came up with the idea of the names of "common", "polite", and "scientific" as the terms I think I will use going forward to simplify these. 

I hope you find these strategies useful, and as usual, I welcome your feedback. 

🤩Just came up with a name for my YouTube followers (and regular students, I suppose)... Tiblings. Like siblings. I like it. 

Teaching Heritage Speakers

Teaching Second-language Learners

I really like Jo Gakonga's channel. She gives very practical tips for ESL teaching, and many are applicable for any second-language teaching context.

These are some other resources for learners and polyglots (multilingual speakers)  with good tips: