I often wonder why so many teachers don’t want to “go there” with comprehensible input. One reason is that when we decide to use comprehensible input as the foundation of all our work in language education, we must then activate the social/emotional piece in our instruction. We can’t do CI without that piece. But most […]
Q Do you use word walls in the Invisibles approach? A. Working with emergent language in the way described in this book eliminates the need for the old pre-determined word walls. The message of those old style word walls was, “You don’t know these words, but if I put them in a list for everyone
Lots of people are using one word images. It is because they are great to create images and images are great to create stories. So if in your department you are working on coaching each other on teaching using OWI, here are some ideas Tina and I have developed: Establish the existence of the object,
I removed the “sit up squared shoulders” rule from my Classroom Rules this past year because it doesn’t work. Children cannot be forced to pay attention. Even if half of them do sit up and look as if they are with us, they are very often not. We fool ourselves. We think that we can
There is a term that we are taught at workshops: “monitoring student comprehension”. It goes in the pile of all those CI teaching skills that we are admonished to learn at conferences by over-zealous trainers. We think that if we can only learn the TPRS skills we can make it all work. But I don’t
I got this question from a member who just joined our group today. A group answer is requested, to give this person, in Germany, a full response: Dear Ben, I have a question about CIRCLING with advanced students (I’m new to TPRS). The situation is as follows: I started with my seventh graders in year
Either our district bosses and the administrators in our buildings want us to get creative and imaginative in our instruction, using all sorts of out-of-the-box strategies, or they want us to cover their curricular demands, address what is in those documents. They can’t have both because we can’t do both. They think that we can
Alisa Shapiro-Rosenberg has been doing a lot of work with non-targeted instruction this year. She is in a unique position to comment on the topic because she teaches both high and low cognate languages, Spanish and Hebrew*. Her comments below raise questions. That is what we need now in the NT discussion. We have to
Q Do you read the novels with the Invisibles program? A. The novels are great additions to any CI program. My problem has been that many teachers introduce them too early, before half the kids in the class can effortlessly read them. That word “effortless” – it is such a key word in Dr. Krashen’s
From Alisa today: I know I’m the least likely person to share a tech tool but a few years back I saw something on Scholastic.com where you could play a virtual slot machine and get a random character + problem + solution, and I thought it would be great as a tool to generate ideas
This is just my opinion: When we go for massed repetitions we just can’t get to the human side in our classrooms, not really. We can’t seem to get a decent level of community going. But without a very high level of community – something I try to design like an architect designs a building
