Ben Slavic

If You Can’t Get It

Here are some words of hope for those who “can’t get” TPRS/CI with its current formula of massive reps, circling and targets. Working without targets allows: 1. More freedom because it is a softer approach to the work of CI that puts the heart first. 2. It is not about crowd control but about helping […]

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More on Transparency

More Krashen on transparency. The “notes” are from a larger context: “Using the first language is especially valuable when teaching a language that has few or no cognates with the students’ first language (Note 6) and for providing background information, but there are other ways to make input comprehensible: e.g. visual context, in the form

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Canned Tests – A Request

Alisa would like to hear from anyone who may also have some insights into the assessment money grab as described below: Since I don’t give grades in elementary, my question for y’all is a bit different but still in the Assessment Arena. It turns out that many schools/districts use a normed assessment like the SOPA

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The Urge for Transparency

Krashen wrote: “Input is transparent if the acquirer understands every word. This is, of course, a crude definition. We could definite extreme transparency as a conscious understanding of not only every word but every grammatical marker and morpheme. “Transparent is not the same as “comprehensible.” If input is transparent, it is comprehensible, but input can

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Comment Count Update

For those following the Comment Count Sweepstakes, we are now at 49, 710. Only 290 comments to go. I am guess at this rate it could happen in a month or two. Maybe six or seven weeks. Early April. Just guessing. Then with comment #50, 001 we start a new 50,000 comments.

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Any Focus on Form

Krashen sent a paper to Tina over the weekend. It discusses Circling but applies to any focus on form in our language classrooms: Circling: Are we just doing ALM (audio-lingual method)? Yes, at its worst. This happens when (1) there is a targeted structure; (2) the questions are obviously intended just to supply more exposure;

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Can’t Do Statements

Q. Do you observe what the students can do in terms of the Can Do statements of ACTFL? How do they fit into your schema? A. Can Do statements do not fit into what I do. Most teachers teach them using skill building, which involves memorization and conscious monitoring of output. That is a far

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NT Video

Keri Biron used to work from targets and has over the past year been testing out non-targeted instruction. Here are some clips that she shared with us and thank you Keri, for your openness to new ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN6T0FQkuVQ&t=10s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdOo2cv4Wds&t=7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_bCkuXZ7dA&t=1s

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CI Liftoff

Recommended Reading: 2015 Notes on TPRS- Contributions, controversies, problems, and new frontiers I don’t think that it is any secret that people in the CI community have been bad mouthing Tina and me for our non-targeted stance. But we have decided to go forth down the road of non-targeted instruction anyway. The main reason for

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