Ben Slavic

Ruth Fleishman sent us this today and thank you Ruth! – Hi Ben – I’ve done a few “Watch & Discuss” (or whatever we are calling it) last year and this year. The discussion here on the blog and Eric’s video have given me some ideas to improve what I do. I just started one […]

Diane ends her three part explanation with this: Approaches to teaching reading in Chinese: Different teachers have different approaches related to using pinyin and characters. In the CI world, I know of three. (It seems that all of them work in the long run, though I have a preference for cold character reading.) – Use

I wanted to add this comment from Robert to the “When Attacked” category. Below he gives practical ideas to younger colleagues for responding with facts to attacking colleagues. These points were posted here by Robert a few years ago but this seems like a good time to review them. New teachers need to know that

Chris offers us below what in my view is a very good description of some of the salient features of what a MT/YTD class should look like. Chris I took out what you said about the no dialogue weakness in MT since you agreed with Jim in a later comment in this thread that we

Here’s a report from one of the Latin Kings, John Bracey: Hi Ben, I wanted to shoot you and the PLC a quick report on how my first year of teaching 7th and 8th grade Latin with CI has been going. Overall it has been incredible. My 7th graders have never had word of Latin

Diane continues: Some terms: Pinyin: phonetic writing system developed in the 1950’s to show standard Mandarin pronunciation of Chinese characters; its goal was to help Chinese understand each other’s speech and standardize “Mandarin.” It’s very scientific – once you know what sound some letters represent, that’s the whole set of syllables available in Chinese: about

My thoughts on MovieTalk change by the hour: I just don’t like the idea of presenting incomprehensible or partially comprehensible input to my students. It would be fine if we had 24/7 to teach them but we don’t. There is incomprehensibility that comes with MT, and that vagueness of the text to my students has

An important text (link below) on MovieTalk by Jody Noble, written and published a year ago here, describes MT in a way that merits discussion, just to make sure that we are all talking about the same thing. Is what Jody wrote here indeed what we are doing in our MT classes? Specifically, I seek

Sometimes I am truly amazed at the speed at which some teachers move deeply into this way of teaching. This report from Laura Cenci is an example: Hello TPRS community! I hope you will forgive my presumptuousness in doing a really LONG therapeutic download here, but this thread [ed. note: the one on MovieTalk] has

I think that two of the above statements in this thread on MovieTalk by two teachers who are new to this work, John and Laura, should be well noted: …as a teacher in his first year of teaching entirely with CI, I have found MT’s to be by far the most successful activity for me….

Last week, in a discussion here about how CI Chinese instruction has its own peculiarities, I asked Diane to write on the topic and she has obliged so thank you, Diane! Her response occurs in three articles here over the next three days. Diane reports: I was recently asked to describe some facets of Chinese

I organized the links we have been receiving, crediting those who contributed. This is the list that will appear on the MT hard link across the top of this page: Movie Talk List Definitive 11-19-14