Ben Slavic

I was watching “Inside the NBA” with Shaqille O’Neal and the “Round Mound of Rebound” Charles Barkley. On their Christmas show they gave away about 40 bicycles – placed on the set – to disadvantaged kids in the Baltimore area.  The kids, all neatly arranged in their Zoom boxes, when they saw the bikes, had

Let’s do a good job of being language teachers, because we certainly don’t want our kids to end up living in a van “down by the river”….

OK. Everybody knows that for at least a decade and more like two decades here there has been a kind of cold war between us (CI teachers) and a new breed of CI teacher who tries to mix traditional instruction with CI by using CI to target vocabulary from lists (from chapters in textbooks, semantic

Our bosses profess to want REFORM in education. We all looked to CI. That was the right place to look. But to our shame we largely ignored the equity/inclusion side of things. Maybe it’s because George Floyd hadn’t yet been murdered. CI alone is not enough to solve the problem of language education. We lacked

To repeat the main point of the last article: how our students do in terms of language gains and how we do at our jobs is directly and deeply connected to how we address the concept of inclusion and equity in our language classrooms. If you can accept this, you will make professional strides that

In recent years, the focus here on the PLC has been not only on CI but also on how we can use CI for better mental health. How can we plan less, rest more, have more time for loved ones, and teach easier with better results? As soon as the pandemic hit, however, the focus

I just made about twenty TikTok videos that all focus on one thing – that we learn languages by focusing on the message and not on the form of the language via worksheets and other clever activities that purport to “teach” the language to our students. Why did I make twenty and not just one?

Certainly, 2020 needed to go. The big world was a disaster, and our small world of language teaching took a major hit as well, with most of the damage being done by the new online Zoom settings, for which we were not prepared and for which we are still not prepared, with not a lot

Of the many questions Robert asks of the textbook companies in this series of articles, this is my favorite: How does the textbook align with the current emphasis by Advanced Placement (College Board), ACTFL and many State Standards on the Three Modes of Communication (Interpersonal, Interpretive and Presentational)? Note that the Advanced Placement test no

Robert continues with his questions for textbook companies. It would be nice if they would answer. But they won’t. Their involvement in education is not spurred by the same interests that prompt these questions from Robert: How does the textbook take the universally recognized Silent Period into account? How does the textbook support the ACTFL

Robert continues to adress Sarah’s original questions with some questions of his own: How do the textbook’s scope and sequence align with the Natural Order of Acquisition? Since language acquisition researchers (e.g. Noam Chomsky, Daniel Pink, Alice Omaggio Hadley, James Asher, Stephen Krashen, Bill Van Patten, Wynne Wong), while disagreeing on many things, all agree