Ben Slavic

I really like the idea of mentioning to parents before school starts what to expect in terms of expectations from their child in the coming school year. I know that not all parents will be able/take the opportunity to do this, but some do. This third suggested blog post is about the classroom rules: French […]

This second suggested school blog post/communication with parents is intended to alert parents to the fact that they should not expect much output based instruction in your language class this year:   Listening and Reading Are the Key Early Skills: It takes a lot of listening to a language to be able to speak it,

Teachers who have a school blog or some other kind of electronic information page for parents might want to consider some of the articles here that I have posted on my own American Embassy School site here in New Delhi. If you use any of them, please feel free to copy or alter in any

I noticed that whenever Dr. Krashen talked to us in St. Paul this summer about comprehensible input and how it should be interesting, he also added, as I remember, that the input should also hopefully be compelling, It seemed to me as if he has lately come to see that in fact interesting CI is

When we try to use our conscious minds to arrange, drive and organize what is an unconscious process, we invariably bore the incredibly powerful unconscious mind. It’s like a little boy trying to get up on stage and elbow some great Italian tenor off the stage, and start singing himself. The unconscious mind then just

OK what is the deal with Haikudeck? Are we going to use it as a slide show delivery platform, or just some of us? How will we make vPQA happen, for those doing it this year, in our classrooms? Will most people just make their vPQA slide shows using Google Images in PP? My reasoning

David Sceggel makes good points about CWB below. This is his comment from last night turned into a post. The reason I post it is because in the first article on the first day of class, I said that I was planning on doing less CWB than in past years in favor of more direct

Here is my 2015-2016 professional growth statement: I want to finally use pausing, a collaborative norm for any group, in the real way, not mechanically. I hope that doing this will allow me to get a window into what my students are getting, really getting, from my instruction. I want to always explore what I

As we continue laying the theoretical groundwork for the first CI class we teach this year, and we’ll get to the nuts and bolts of that soon, we again make the point that organizing CI instruction in terms of choosing certain verbs to teach in a certain order, usually an order based on frequency of

In the Denver Public Schools what we do is work backwards from novels. We make a list of the verbs that are necessary to read a certain novel, teach those verbs using the the various comprehensible input skills that we have, and then read the novel, which because of all the work spent teaching the

The order in which the verbs are taught doesn’t matter, since we know from Krashen that we can’t know or predict the order in which language is absorbed by the human brain anyway. When the wall-posted master list is completed at the end of the year, the students will know those verbs. This doesn’t happen

I mentioned in the last post that I only stop working with a verb when it feels “saturated”. Here are some more thoughts on that important topic: I only add a verb to the list on the upper walls when I feel that roughly 90% of the students in each of my classes “is familiar”