Chris Stoltz reports: Hi Ben – There are Western Canada workshops coming up, useful also for US people in Northern Idaho, Montana and Washington states: The BC Association of Teachers of Modern Languages (BCATML) conference is here (Vancouver) and will be open for registration in a few weeks. There will be an Intro to TPRS […]
I have a question for those using jGR. It’s really just a reflection question because each of us do this work differently. Here it is: Can cCWB obviate the need to use jGR? For me, when I circle “Juan dances” for the entire class period, always using the verb in every single thing I say, I find that
I’m going to repost this every few weeks or whenever I think about it for obvious reasons: As we know, last week our group member Trisha Schutzius (Fort Collins, CO) rounded up all the information in the Robert Harrell Scope and Sequence articles and put them into one document that she called rSS/Sum. This summary and
Yesterday our new group member Deena sent in this report. I jumped it up in the queue because it is more than cool: Hey Ben! Cannot contain myself! I had my first day of the real deal today…I reviewed the RULES that I introduced yesterday and started in with a few structures in Spanish…Hay (there
This is the last in the series of posts about the Georgia Foreign Language tenets. Gary Null has been doing his thing promoting natural and wholistic ways of healing the body for about thirty years now. All through the years there was a feeling in Gary’s message, and in the country as a whole, that
Panel 20: Maintain open communication about the program and student progress among teachers, administrators, and the general public. Over my 32 years in the classroom, I have never met a more secretive, closed door policy group of educators than foreign language teachers, as a general comment. Furthermore, I have been observed countless times by administrators who had limited
Panel 19: Seek frequent opportunities for professional and language growth. I’m in! But it didn’t start until I got a scholarship to Starbucks University in Colorado where Susan Gross conducted one on one instruction with me over a period of years in a non credit class that changed my life completely. So the record goes
Panel 17: Communicate regularly with classroom teachers about student progress and program goals and content. In theory, this is great. But it doesn’t really happen. At least not in the real world. Let’s be honest. Professional open sharing of information between teachers for the good of the kids is not a real common thing in schools.
Panel 16: Use a variety of strategies to maintain frequent and regular contact with parents. Of course! With the difference that in TPRS those contacts are largely positive, whereas, when I used to do the realia, activities, games, and all of the stuff described in this document, not to mention that nasty old testing, the parent contacts were largely
Panel 15: Assess learner progress frequently and regularly, using a variety of types of assessment. Definitely yes, with one major qualification. Teachers must be superhuman to do what is being asked in this Georgia document and still have to time to assess as per the above. Assessment drains the life out of teachers in most educational systems, not
Panel 14: Encourage growing independence and independent language use on the part of learners, moving them toward increased expression of individual ideas and opinions. There is an image of a child in a cardboard TV set talking about himself, presumably in L2. Again, this kind of output is not just unreasonable to expect – it is outrageous to think
Maybe I can get a second agreement with Georgia on panel 13 – right now I am pretty much at odds with those folks: Provide opportunities for learners to express personal meaning from the earliest stages of the program. The image shows a child holding up a drawing of something with the subtitle “sharing personal information” in the
