For those newer people who are still not quite comfortable with asking a story from a story script, this is an attempt at simplifying it. It’s partly taken from TPRS in a Year! – Although working from a story script may seem complex, it is not. The novice TPRS/CI teacher should simply focus on comprehensible input […]
Melissa when I taught in less friendly domains (buildings in which the department hadn’t turned yet) I always made sure I used my thematic units. It was purely for show, because we can’t learn languages from lists of words, but it did shut up the memorizer kids and the parents of kids who think that
I am moving this article by Steve Ford over here from the Forum. It is powerful and parallels what we have been reading from Melissa today: Hello PLC, Once again I’m seeking advice. Thanks in advance for your input. Here is a short summary of events that led up to my current situation: My school,
This just in from Bob Patrick: The Director of FL for my district was just at my school. (For context, our school district is the largest in GA–167,000 students, the largest employer in GA, and one of the largest in the US. It was awarded the Broad Prize for best urban school district in the
Melissa needs support and advice from the group: It has been a while since I have posted on here and I am writing because I need encouragement and support. I feel alone and attacked a little bit for wanting to do the three-phrase model of language acquisition (which I simply label: the Slavic way). I,
I got this amusing anecdote from James yesterday just at a time when I needed a good laugh. My takeaway, besides the good laugh, is to remember to not share what is precious to me with people who don’t appreciate or recognize precious things: Ben, I just fell into the trap of suggesting in a
Jeff shares this with the group. An excellent article and thank you Jeff: http://www.10news.com/news/more-talking-to-babies-helps-their-brains-021414 Jeff adds: It’s for babies, but just goes to show that humans don’t learn languages – even their own – through anything but listening and understanding!
Diana Neubauer just typed up two articles on Krashen – thank you Diane! – summarizing this website: http://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html. She explains: “It’s a summary of a summary! The page 1 version would be more for adults; the page 2 version I wrote with my 5th grade class in mind. I actually wrote page 1 for a
What we do is rigorous and often we must deal with the unknown, and so must be guided by our intuition on a moment to moment basis in class. Below is a quote from John Piazza. In it, he finds further support for the fact that running a class completely in the target language using
Imagine a wire mesh on top of an empty container. We try to fill the container with words. But not all the words get through the mesh. We can’t stuff them in through the mesh. It is a natural process. All we can do is keep speaking the language, and some of the words natural
CI is a very simple thing, but it requires that the teacher completely shift their teaching to appeal to the unconscious minds of the students. This is a big shift and not easy for the teacher who still thinks that their students can reason their way to mastery of a language. To our credit, we in this
We must be aware of the invisible though vital web of connectedness that exists between our students. Of course there is the entire web which includes us as teachers, but there is also a web between the kids themselves. It is a web that potentially houses mistrust or positive relationships between the individuals in the
