Indeed, this is a most fortunate month, this month of March, 2017 in our history as a community of language teachers. It is the month in which Dr. Beniko Mason’s new book on Story Listening, currently

This brings us to the data piece. If we are to make our students actually want to be in our classrooms, we must also lower our desire to constantly collect data on them. Why? Because

We must look at what our students really would want as they come into our classrooms each day. They do not come in wanting to learn the language. That comes later. They first come in wanting

One must want to learn. If a student is intimidated, or if there is a possibility that she can be wrong, or that someone may laugh at her, or observe that the clothes she is

We also must lower the stress levels in our classrooms. How to do that? We can only do it in one way, by making our classrooms into places where stress is not allowed to enter in. This is

So also is it true that, in our language classrooms, no matter how much we put our students through their paces in the form of circled and targeted “workouts”, we will not see the kinds

It is like the training of a distance athlete. She can train hard every day getting reps on the track, circling away, formatively targeting certain outcomes for each lap that she runs on the track on

Only by increasing interest can we shorten the distance between people which alone can bring language gains. Bringing people closer together so that they really want to be together is not something that can be

About a week ago here Udo asked why we don’t discuss the TPRS mainstay skills of Circling and massed repetitions of target structures much any more, like we used to. It is because some of