I was talking with Diana Noonan this weekend and she told me that a child of 12 can pay attention for 12 minutes, 11 year olds for 11 minutes, etc. – one minute for each year of life. If that is true, we can conclude that the longest we should go on the Ten Minute […]
Let’s say that in our WL level 1 class we have a class of 30, of whom 20 are ELL kids with limited English. One thing we could do would be to write the targets for a story in their languages with translation and give them that list of translations. Each ELL student would instantly
Here is Diane’s proposal for San Diego: Title: Teaching Beginners Comprehensibly Type: Session Applicable Language: Any Language of Presentation: English Lead Presenter: Diane Neubauer Valor Christian High School Additional Presenter: Ngan Ha Ta Kent Denver School Reed Riggs University of Hawaii At M?noa Content and Purpose: Teaching for language acquisition requires teachers to balance many
The conjugation police are out there as we all know, but they’re super lame and not to be taken too seriously. I usually ask my kids when they (one or two type A students) are fretting because they aren’t picking up the verb conjugations instantly, if they’ll have any problem understanding this utterance, “my friend buy
This is from Diane: Hi Ben, Attached is my proposal for ACTFL 2015. Since I’m using this exact wording, anyone else planning something similar should re-word heavily, but please share it with the PLC as you wish. Reed Riggs and Ngan-Ha Ta, Haiyun Lu, & Pu-Mei Leng are also submitting proposals more or less related
A few days ago I complained about the ACTFL Five C Chart, that it misrepresented the role of Communication, as Nathaniel described a few days ago and which is a must read if you haven’t read it yet: https://benslavic.com/blog/thoughts-on-the-standards/ When a teacher is told that culture is as important as communication she ends up justifying
This is from Alisa: Hello, PLC friends! Regarding WL teacher conferences, I prefer the Learning Lab model, but I want to present at ACTFL 2015 because I have heard that many WL teachers are interested in learning an alternative way of approaching their work. I am told there is a hunger for and interest in
I have always thought that the door to all aspects of the culture we teach remains locked to those who don’t have its language, at least some degree of ability to communicate. But on the ACTFL site the famous “Five C’s” – the official national standards – are depicted in the image of a kind
A repost from a year ago: In this communication Robert and a parent, we almost have a template from Robert that we could modify to use to answer inquiries like the one he recently received below: Hi Ben, I’m sending you an e-mail exchange that I just had with a parent. I’ve edited it to make it anonymous;
Even though the scripts are written in the present tense, I advise that you create the story with the kids in the past tense. This is a point of major discussion (and contention) in the TPRS community. I am giving my opinion here that we must ask the story in the past tense and write
I’m including this as a What to Do After A Vacation possibility because it is so simple to set up when everyone in the building (including us) is still groggy from vacation: I ask the class what I they would do in a certain situation: ….it was 10:00 p.m. A woman was looking for you. Why?
Do we really need to talk solely about the language piece in the ELA problem as a one of instructional mechanics? Is there not more going on here? I don’t think that the ELA problem can be solved in a mechanical way, by trying to find the right “method”. We have done that and failed.
