A few days ago I received an email from a teacher in Australia, Michelle Fisher. Some months back I had sent her the “Self-Study” Ultimate CI Training materials – here is that link: https://benslavic.com/product/self-study-course/ Below is the email. In a subsequent post, I give feedback on what Michelle sent me: Hi Ben, Just touching base again […]
Natural targeting is a term I just created. It’s what we do in the Ultimate CI approach. What is it? Instead of pulling targets from word lists in textbooks (semantic sets, thematic units, high frequency verb lists, etc.) and then testing our students every few weeks as we do now, we use the questioning levels
Natural Targeting Implies Delayed Testing (Teach for June) Read More »
The word out on CI now and for the past ten years is to get the students reading as much as possible as early as possible. But that doesn’t make sense. They have to hear and understand the spoken language before making that next step to reading, don’t they? It’s just common sense. But profits
Our Educational Practices Reflect Our Society As A Whole Read More »
Can’t we finally just let the part of the brain that brings language proficiency do all the work, as originally designed by the Master Architect, and thereby achieve some degree of relaxation in our classrooms? It is possible! Not only is it possible, but I think that learning how to teach in a way that
Language education reform is happening NOW and teachers who are not aware of the research are looking increasingly silly with each passing day as they bow down at the altar of the status quo. Lots of language teachers are now starting to finally unite and inform their too-often oblivious district supervisors that they are doing
No complex curriculums are needed to learn a language. No word lists are needed. No thematic unit lists are needed. No semantic sets are needed. No high frequency verb lists are needed. No testing is needed. All we have to do is deliver interesting/compelling CI. The “no testing” comment above may have raised one or
Language teaching differs dramatically from teaching other school subjects. In language instruction, all we have to do is speak to our students in ways that they understand. That’s all that is needed. Everything else is taken care of by the powerful unconscious mind, which we give so little credit to when we design language curriculums,
Patrons get free access to all my trainings and books described here: https://benslavic.com/bens-shop The next training is a Book 1 training: https://benslavic.com/product/ultimate-ci-book-1-six-weeks-training/ But do be aware of the other perks and use them. One of the best benefits to be found here is your access to thousands of posts and tens of thousands of comments
One of the differences between what we do here and what they do elsewhere in terms of CI is that we always start with an image. You can pick any kind of an image you want, but the best tableaux and stories come from one word and also individually created images. Why? It is because
The Ultimate CI program works is designed: To fully align with the research. To fully reflect the Communication Standard. In order to accomplish that in the world of actions and not just in the world of words (many CI programs lie about what they do): It is designed on and based in a feeling of
We welcome Stacey Gonzalez, Barbara Routledge, and Ana Garcia to the group. I don’t know Stacey and Ana yet. Barbara is a Nationally Certified Board Spanish teacher in Oklahoma whom I met years ago at a TPRS national conference. I’m counting on her to provide a strong anchor to the work we do here because
There is absolutely no basis for some language teachers’ insistence on doing something in a particular manner just because it’s the way they have always done it. Such teachers rarely even speculate that it might be interesting to try a different way to do things in their classrooms. They don’t want to change. Whenever they
