Tom Scovel was born and raised in China, attended high school in India, and pursued his university education in the United States, receiving a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Michigan in 1970. After completing their studies, he and his wife taught in Thailand for seven years, and they also taught at the Tianjin Foreign Languages Institute in 1979. Tom has published many articles and four books and given many conference presentations in the areas of English Language Teaching, Psycholinguistics, Neurolinguistics, and Second Language Acquisition. He has just retired from forty-seven years of teaching- half of that time at San Francisco State University where he is an emeritus professor.

TITLE: 捡了芝麻，丢了西瓜 Sesame seeds, watermelons, and grammar teaching

ABSTRACT
Grammar and the way focus on form changes function and meaning has always been an important part of English language teaching in China. However, there are many ways in which grammar teaching can be taught effectively thanks to insights from the fields of psycholinguistics and second language acquisition. In addition, it is important to prioritize grammatical structures so that the ones that mark meaning most significantly are taught first. This talk will offer practical examples of how frequency effects, perceptual saliency, position effects, episodic memory, and listening can all be used to help Chinese learners acquire and use English structures more successfully.