Ben Slavic

Sorry about the confusion in PLC access. It’s getting resolved.

I’ll be out of Delhi without a computer until Wednesday of next week. You can read around in the archives. (Some of the best posts here are from the early days of this blog from 2007 to 2012, when the ideas we were coming up with then have proven to be still true to Krashen

Of course this would have to be tweaked but may help someone at some point. It is written to a parent of a native speaker child who requested of me that the child be moved up two levels to eighth grade from sixth in response to my email about the child’s (minor) behavior issues: Hello [name of

Location NowCast AQI PM2.5(ug/m3) Date US Embassy New Delhi 502 502.7 2016-01-26 12:00:00 IST US Consulate Hyderabad 157 66.2 2016-01-26 12:00:00 IST US Consulate Chennai 105 37.0 2016-01-26 12:00:00 IST US Consulate Kolkata 198 146.7 2016-01-26 12:00:00 IST US Consulate Mumbai 170 91.8 2016-01-26 12:00:00 IST Anyone who knows about the Air Quality Index knows

I got an email saying that the Forum is down. Can a few people check on that and let me know in a comment field below?

We can all teach like Aretha sings. My colleague here at the American Embassy School, Anna Citrino, wrote about that idea on her blog. Check it out. It describes what we must do every day as story telling teachers, and what Aretha does: https://annacitrino.wordpress.com/    

When we mix L1 with L2 in class, their minds don’t know which one to try to understand. They get confused. But when we stay SLOW and steady in the L2, and the input is fun and easy to listen to, and lots of emotions are involved along with creatures they created as the main

Stories + Invisibles = TPRS On Steroids The above formula is true at least for me, and for my own students. They just literally mobbed me after class to get THEIR idea – of how Mr. Lintus Lint go rescued by his daughter – accepted into the not finished story. We argued about whether Lint’s

We get scared when we are flying by the seat of our pants in the asking of a story. But that is where the greatest safety lies.

Today I saw the value of dialogues and focusing on actors during stories, especially during recyclings of the story. If we ask an actor how they felt in a particular instance in the story, and we ask them to say how they felt, that is when we can coach them to explain to the class how

Not everyone understands that we don’t use word walls in order to teach those certain words that appear in that list. We use them as a fertile source of verbs and other parts of speech to use during class, in free writes, etc. The words in the word wall are just there, helping us or,

Krashen has come out to say in the past year that motivation is not needed in CI classes, as long as the story is interesting/compelling. The implication there is that human beings cannot resist a good story. Krashen doesn’t know how hard it is to make a story interesting, though, especially in most of the