General information for this training is below. If you want to have smooth sailing through the winter and spring, and be ready with a supercharged curriculum for next year, take this January class. Here’s the link with the details: https://benslavic.com/product/ultimate-ci-book-1-six-weeks-training/ And here’s the cool part, my patrons get the training at half price! DATES FOR […]
Circling doesn’t work. It’s old. Don’t buy into it anymore. If you feel that your recent teaching with CI has been boring, look to Circling as one of the causes. That and a lack of proper structure in your CI instruction. Circling came into the old TPRS/CI movement in 2005. I was there for that grand
Daniel Tiger is an innocent young tiger, very much like our students. The result of our stubborn focus on the form of the language and on the way that it is built mechanically is that our instruction has become alarmingly mechanical. Tigers don’t do mechanical. They do natural. We just haven’t provided our students with any
In the short video below, Lady Elaina apologizes to Daniel Tiger for forgetting to visit him. Should we not all have similar conversations with our students? Should we not now finally start to apologize to our students for forgetting their real needs as children studying a language and their needs to be treated in class
There is a lot of negative energy pulling us back to the textbook, but it will be short-lived. Don’t get fooled. The language teachers of the future will teach from their hearts and not their minds, since it is pretty clear right now that the old ways of teaching languages are in their death throes.
One of our group members teaches Zulu language. I know – that needs a repeat – he teaches Zulu. I didn’t even know it was a language and so you can add my name to the legion of people who don’t know much about Africa. But we can forgive ourselves and move on and get
It’s the lists that caused much of the confusion out there today about CI instruction. The traditional teachers couldn’t believe that lists weren’t needed to acquire a language. They couldn’t handle the radical thought that just CI is all that is needed for people to learn a language. Why? It’s because comprehensible input is the
Testing is a structure/form that absolutely strangles comprehensible input, whose benefits are hard to measure and different in terms of speed of acquisition for each individual student, since everyone processes new language at different speeds. But the fact that each CI student learns at different speeds didn’t stop the traditional movement from testing CI students
The problem in CI has always been that big gap, alluded to in the previous post, between what Blaine and Susie and Jason and the other super stars of the movement could do and what novice CI teachers could do. There was such a big disconnect between what the original reformers and innovators who had
We could sum up the first two articles in this series of posts on form and function in CI language instruction by saying that we have needed a CI curriculum that offers some kind of “form” within which to keep us “safe” as we speak to our students in the TL. We haven’t had that. We
A lot of us in the language teaching profession might agree that, even in CI/TPRS circles, the lack of balance between form and function in our profession is a core factor in explaining our unceasing failures to really reach kids with good communicative activities. Why do teachers trying to teach using comprehensible input fail so
This design maxim came out of the 19th century in architecture. I love it. Here is an example from Wikipedia about its meaning: “If the design of an automobile conforms to its function—for instance the desire to sit six people in two rows—then its form is said to follow its function.” How does this apply
