This is a note to us from Alisa. In my view it sheds light on a part of the instructional caverns that people w testing mentalities may never have thought of – if it’s not fun then why do it? This is especially true of younger kids Alisa’, who are basically sending the message to […]
I got this oft-discussed question from a PLC member. It’s like a Zen koan. It’s good to revisit it from time to time: Ben – Do you know if any of the NT hard-hitters are working in a system that is locked into standards-based education? If they have to test kids on all of the
Q. I first purchased Susan Gross’s DVDs and saw lots of circling and reps. When I googled for TPRS I found your website and got two of your books: Stepping Stones & TPRS in a Year. I got the idea that you too advocated this kind of circling and reps. But in the PLC I
T1 is deeply embedded in the collective unconscious of teachers. Unpacking the language into parts is our default mode, and unlearning that is the real work of becoming a comprehension-based teacher. Grammar-translation and audio-lingual methods are the way the vast majority of us were taught, and thus it is the way we think subconsciously about
Q. I see that when you choose a character to use for a particular story it is usually just one kid’s character and the details they provided for that character. I’m wondering if it would work if the details came from different characters created from different students – a mix and match. This would replicate
Viola Davis in speaking about her profession said: “I became an artist, and thank God I did, because we are the only profession that celebrates what it means to live a life.” I would add that we in the field of foreign language education have a chance at getting in on that concept of celebrating
How is it that just a few favorite strategies like Questioning with Balls (formerly Circling with Balls) and One Word Images can be used over and over in all our classes if the “brain craves novelty”? It is because it is not the strategy that gets boring, it is the content, and with the strategies
Tina wrote this on the morelist today. It addresses the concern that Jeff brought up on Monday that non-targeted instruction brings us out too wide and thus lose the kids. It represents a good description of a reasonable position between the “Just Talk to the Kids” extreme and the Targeted extreme: In my view the
Q. How do we make sure that our students will hear the “important” words (some call them “high frequency”) if we go non-targeted? A. If we are teaching for whole-language mastery, then we need to unlearn or let go of the idea that we are teaching parts of the language. If the high-frequency words are
Need a good group response here. This request is from Alisa: Ben, Since we don’t have a hard-core or reliable data collection protocol in this work (in beginner to intermediate level foreign language class), many CI teachers rely on free writes, timed writes and retells (often video-recorded) to document their students’ progress. While these types
Alisa wrote in a comment here yesterday: …every time someone moves to a new country without the benefit of scaffolded classes, there’s tons of noise! So I guess we are saying that our efforts to control and scaffold to eliminate noise are misguided; that a story with some noise flakes in it is good and
Q. I’ve watched some videos of Tina doing OWI and would like to try it. What are your tips for starting with a level 1 class that already knows some descriptive words and a level 2 that knows much more but could use some new adjectives/detailed ways to describe things? A. The way I do
