Q. Why do you think that university teachers aren’t doing much of anything in the way of storytelling? A. They are given the cream of the crop from high schools. That instantly maintains the status quo that the kids brought with them to college. It’s a win-win for both the professors and students – everyone […]
The change we are in about how languages are taught is not going to go away because it doesn’t align with the bland, predictable and uninformed district expectations of what language teaching should look like, expectations that have not changed in decades while the profession itself is on fire with change. Are we really going
Those who have been reading here for the past ten years know that Anne Matava’s script books rock the house but as we move forward more and more toward non-targeted work, we are starting to see that her story scripts are really much more aligned with non-targeted work than with targeted work. So now we
Many of us need to take a good hard and honest look at what we are doing, in the interest of keeping our mental health at the forefront of our work with CI, since many of us have decided here recently is far more important than being a CI rock star. This article from Carolyn Dickson
Q. I try to not introduce any new words and go out of bounds but I am not very good at it. Too many words seem to creep into the discussion. What can I do? A. There is kind of a self-regulating mechanism in non-targeted instruction and so really we don’t need to worry so
I once visited a Montessori school where 3rd graders were doing vocabulary worksheets. They weren’t overly enthralled, and probably would be more enthralled by this story from Alisa: Superman calls Sponge Bob (SB) and says, “There’s a party.” (Hurray, I love parties!) SB called Minnie Mouse (MM). He says, “There’s a party.” (Hurray, I love
Q. The idea of no planning destroys my entire concept of what my job is as a teacher. Don’t I have to plan? Don’t I have to teach? A. You can if you want to but in my view it destroys the very spontaneity and beauty that are required to get our students to acquisition
Q. It seems like such a simple thing – just talking to the kids. Why is it so difficult? A. Actually, I recently remembered that I used to just “talk to the kids” thirty years ago. I had forgotten that, but now I remember it. It was emotional to remember that I had once tried
Craig shares a website called wordsift.org: Just paste any text into the space there and it gives you options for analyzing the text: word clouds, word frequency, thesaurus, etc. It can be a quick way to review language from class stories, create quizzes and things like that.
Q. So the big problem is that we haven’t been really following what Dr. Krashen says? A. I would say that the big problem is that we haven’t been trusting that the kids will learn the language if we just speak to them naturally. Q. So should one then not even try to teach a
We’ve been making a lot of music over the years and I figured out that we hit our official ten year anniversary for this group in January. Actually I’ve been blogging since 2003 but the archives only go back to ’07 due to losing stuff from the old blog. So Happy Anniversary, everyone! A few
This is a repost from 2007: If new teachers, in their efforts to satisfy some kind of benchmark on some pacing guide, forget the kid, they will never effectively teach the benchmark anyway. The kid will only do enough to pass the class, and they won’t acquire much, leaving the foreign language profession with business
