The gorilla in the room in all school foreign language departments is TPRS. It may be accurate to say that John Bracey most dramatically lives what we all live with the colleagues in our buildings, but we are all to some degree in his situation. Little nuances of tension and conflict in our buildings are […]
Krishnamurthy said: “It is not a measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society.” I’m trying to figure out what this means in terms of my TPRS practice.
Nothing holds the interest of students in TPRS classes like stories. It’s not even close.
Today I peeled off about 200 layers of the CI onion. The class that just left my classroom taught me how to do it. We were working from a killer script. The script was short and the sentences were tight. The script was not long and drawn out. The structures were limited. I went through the
It’s nuts when a teacher depends on the scores of a kid on a standardized test for their sense of professional self worth. Many kids are not motivated because they are simply too young to appreciate what is being offered to them. Tests should not be looked at as accurate barometers of progress in language
I was very pleased to welcome a beginning French student who studies with PLC member Don Read to New Delhi from San Francisco yesterday. With dual citizenship, Sahaana and her family were here for Divali. I chose an Anne Matava script called “Seated in the Corner’ from her new book because it came highly rated by Anne.
…the “target structures” are just a means of giving the kids language so they can accomplish the ultimate goal of communicating ideas…. Claire said this here last week and this pretty much nails it. Under Eric’s guidance, we are recently starting to see that the target structures play a far less critical role than most
Hi Ben, Beth found a movie talk video that is very funny that some may like to try this (short) week… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtf71rRvCZg I was thinking of these structures weighs a lot/drops/throws/slippery Thanks Ben, for all you do! The PLC continues to play a crucial role in my PD and encouragement as a teacher. Skip
A teacher has locked horns with a parent simply because he uses best practices in foreign language instruction. Again, right? Who in our group has NOT had to schlep this scene? I think that he handled it beautifully: The parent: Bonjour, I wanted to follow up a bit to gain a better understanding of your
I got a few questions: One Word Images: in your book you give “house” as the example word from which the class creates the image. What would be three staple questions to use with this (versus 2/ 3 questions you list for an animal – when, what doing). I guess with either noun, my question is
Responding to Eric on the Sandra Savignon article*, John Bracey said: “Very important point, Eric. We haven’t happened upon a better way to prepare kids for conjugating verbs or declining nouns. We have learned how to teach a language to another human being. Given an assessment on spontaneous comprehension and production, our students should perform
Here is Angie demonstrating for us the difference between mere Circling and actually gathering information because she wants to know what her students are actually thinking (communication). The kids’ answers are short and easy for them to create and the topic is interesting. I personally wouldn’t have allowed Isaac to keep his head down. I would have
