Ben Slavic

New job: the Creator of the Invisibles. This student draws and labels our class invisibles with details like foods they like, favorite color, invisible sisters and brothers, etc. (See “Jobs for Kids” category for more)

From Judy Dubois in France: There were about 40 teachers at the [TPRS] event in Utrecht and at least 10 of them told me they want to come to Agen. Kirstin and Iris* are lovely people, I so enjoyed meeting them. They agreed to come to Paris in November for the TESOL conference where I’m speaking

From Eric Herman. This serious indictment concerns ESL teachers as well: From the 5 elementary schools which feed to 1 high school, only 5 graduating 8th graders skipped level 1 HS Spanish. 4 from the same town. 1 from my school (Edg). Placement was decided by a 100-question discrete vocabulary test and 100-question discrete grammar

From Tina Hargaden: Hi Ben, I am hoping that you can help me network on behalf of COFLT (the Coalition in Oregon for Foreign Language Teaching). I just finished helping with the COFLT conference and we have opened our call for proposals for our 2016 fall conference.  I was appointed vice-president of COFLT and that

From Angie. Big wonderful possibilities here to teach family relationships and body parts while keeping the kids totally focused on the message and not the words, which is how language acquisition works: Angie shares: “My newest discovery for dealing with the Family thematic unit is the Addams family. There’s a grandmother, uncle, a cousin, brother,

  I know that many of us are just now beginning reading on a more serious level after all the auditory CI of the first few months of school, but I just have to post this again from Eric. I’ll post it again in the middle of winter when we are starting to crank things

This from Nathaniel is gold, a must read. I made it into a Primer article. Of particular value is this sentence: …VP’s goal is communicative. The language is used to find out and share information about each other in the class. The goal of the legacy teacher is to teach vocabulary to demonstrate knowledge on

From Michele: Martina just sent me a link: Thursday talk shows with BVP!! https://billvanpatten.wordpress.com/ I’m going to be listening. Late, since it’s the start of my advanced class just then in Anchorage, but I’m excited about this!

We continuously allow blurting. Who among us can dispute that point? We have come up with, over many many years, all sorts of tricks – a million ideas it seems like – to win the battle. We keep losing it. In my department, as a result of the success of our “community meetings” (we had two

Our Steven Ordiano in CA joins a long list over the years of teachers here who over the years have had to respond to administrators who – despite good intentions – cannot seem to understand the actual nature of comprehensible input instruction. Steven is not the first nor will he be the last to be asked

Robert expresses something that has been about two years in the making. I feel it is true: …I think there is a trend forming. I, too, used to stress over “bell-to-bell instruction”, making every minute count, and getting “enough” CI in. Now that I understand the time frame of acquisition better, I understand that “losing”

Here is something that Linda and I do from time to time with our students: Please address the following prompts: 1. What do you most enjoy about our class? 2. What activity do you feel is the most useful in learning French/Mandarin? 3. What is something that you struggle with in class? 4. Do you feel that