Ben Slavic

Hi Ben, In the last trimester of my first year of teaching I have finally gotten into the groove of how I want to teach with CI. I have been having a great time teaching students that are all behind in credits with a history of not being successful at school. I have adopted the […]

Here are six short videos that cut to the chase about SLA. According to Chris Stolz, in them VP “trashes the grammarians and the outputters and explain SLA in terms even an idiot can get.” I think Eric found this originally. I will put it in the Primers. http://learninglanguages.celta.msu.edu/sla-vanpatten/

This one is from Don Read: Hi Ben, I needed a brain break/game yesterday and one of my students suggested we play a game we had played last year. It was the good old ¨Heads-up, 7 up¨. Of course we played it in French, giving me the chance for a lot of reps on ¨I

As we get deeper into this work we are changing our ideas about what speech output from students is about. We have the writing thing pretty much down but as we go along we are seeing more and more happening in terms of what we are seeing kids doing in speaking the language in our

Diane Neubauer videotaped a MovieTalk class today. Here’s the link: She shares: This is a Chinese 3 class. We’re doing MovieTalk with a full-length film and this was the first day watching the movie, second day of a 6-week unit created for it. I am probably speaking much too fast. However, I was tracking with

Jobs, in Spanish especially, are available in Denver Public Schools. Contact Diana: diana_noonan@dpsk12.org And she will give you the details about what positions are open in which school. I think that the East High job is filled but there are others.

Does anyone teach more than 150 kids per day or have more than five sections? I know James has eight Latin sections and Robert Harrell has 186 German students, but what about others? To me, 150 and five is just about as much as a teacher can handle, and yet I hear about teachers who

For years I had been using the term “Class, show me…” in English whenever asking for a gesture for a target structure to start a PQA session, but that was before my big conversion to a full on 99% L1 use this year that resulted from what I saw while observing in DPS this year.

Jeff shares: I need some advice about how to proceed with my school to do what is best for students and for me. Our program has grown since I began teaching here. We are the second largest language to Spanish, although far from reaching it. We really need another teacher, but our district is not

Jody sent this:

Eric shares: I wanted to share something I’ve started doing in the first 5 minutes of class. I read one of the stories or MTs that we did earlier this year. – It’s review. – It’s building listening fluency, i.e. you can speed up your reading of a story that is so familiar. – It’s

Michele shares a low-tech but highly personalized version of MovieTalk: Here is a twist on MovieTalk. First, my classes read some simple Russian anecdotes/short stories together. Then small groups make a storyboard of a story with plans to make short wordless videos. I tell them that the video-making has to take less than fifteen minutes,