Ben Slavic

Brigitte was kind enough to send us the frequency list for German words and thank you Brigitte. 200 German High-Frequency Words – Google Sheets

Our group member Jeanette Borich who wrote that wonderful article on TPRS (link below and a great read) announces her retirement below. We celebrate her career and tenacity!  Hey Ben, I have happy news! I announced my retirement from 39 years of teaching.  They say ya know when it is time to go, and now

Hey Ben – Hope all is well with you. Exciting news about the new book! Here’s an email from one of the people who participated in the training I did this fall. I put in a strong pitch to join the blog and it sounds like she did: Hi Elissa – I wanted to thank

It’s just amazing what teachers think. Chris Stolz shares some information that reveals just how out of touch some teachers really are about the concept of rigor: Hey Ben – You might want to add this to the research/primers hardlink. It is a blog post in response to Greg Stout’s moronic defartment head who maintained

I’m not sure this kind of thing has happened in any state in the way it is happening in Arizona. At the middle of it is Michael Coxon: Happy Sunday friends, I wanted to let you all know about the standards revision committee that I was a part of on Friday.  I had to sign a

Each year the discussion here reveals rich new lodes of thought that illustrate and describe that this way of teaching will always be about change. It will never be static and it will never take the form of concrete. The change we are in will never be about false change (thinking that computer programs in SLA are a new

Angie asks: Hi Ben, I wonder if we could get some conversation going on the blog about managing Free Writes.  Today I had my Novices (low and mid) do a 10-minute free write.  A few were frustrated because they got cut off by the time and had a lot left of the story to write. 

I would like to make a rather off base, probably ill-advised comment today about my purposes in creating this PLC. Whether anyone agrees with it, or whether it is politically correct, I don’t care. It’s my blog. After reading what some of my heroes, the readers of this blog, are going through in their buildings

Eric Herman has defined a few terms we use a lot: Proficiency is the ability to communicate language – spontaneously and without rehearsal – in familiar and unfamiliar contexts (i.e. not limited to the content of a particular curriculum and maintains the ability across all tasks appropriate to language level) – understandable to native speakers

Auditory Focus Auditory focus is a unique quality of awareness of the language that we see in our students’ faces when we are circling well. It happens when we don’t leave a structure until we feel that the class has moved the information from their ears into their eyes. What does this mean? Sometimes, when

We’re moving closer to a resolution of how to set up our vPQA project. Bryan shares two important details: 1. You can use Haikudeck to search for images that you want. If you put just the images on the slides and then export the presentation as a Powerpoint Presentation you can then use the images

Michael shares with us the results of that meeting he had last week. The point he makes is that when discussing the use of comprehensible input with people/colleagues who quite simply don’t want to hear our positions, we should not try to convince them. Instead, we need to learn to play a broken record for