Panel 12 says: Plan lessons to include a variety of activities, student groupings, and types of interaction that will appeal to differing learner interests and learning styles. And there is an image of a bunch of kids sitting around in groups drawing a picture of a monster together, subtitled as “cooperative learning experiences”. Last I heard, cooperative […]
Let’s go to Panel 11: Use songs and rhymes to reinforce meaning and practice language. Choose authentic songs, games, stories, and rhymes in reference to translations whenever possible. I agree with the first sentence. Songs rock. Rhymes rock. Stories rock. Games? Uh, not sure on that one. I think that when we do games the kids
Panel 10 says: Incorporate communicative use of reading and writing from early stages of instruction. There is the word communicative. It might mean something. I’m not sure what they mean though. No one does, really, do we? If you ask a teacher who uses the target language about 30% of the time in their classroom if they
For those just coming in on this TPRS vs. Georgia thread, this continues the republication started in August of a series of articles I wrote five years ago when I came across on the internet something like a power point presentation created by the state of Georgia about tenets it held to be true about foreign
Like Dorothy, who simply had to click her heels to be home, all we need, all of us, to succeed at TPRS is to quit making it into so much of a mystery, quit trying so hard, quit obsessing about all the steps and procedures involved in comprehension based instruction, and quit insisting on making a simple
I once asked my teacher Susan Gross what percentage of teachers who claimed to do TPRS really did the method as it is supposed to be done. The answer was a snarky 1%. We somehow get the false idea that not only do we have to learn the challenging skills of the method, but also
We are all just panning for gold. We are searching for nuggets lying amidst the skills of TPRS/CI and the daily practice of teaching. We seek flashes of gold, something, the right idea, the right technique, the right way to personalize, that will help us teach better. But focusing on skills is only part of
I laughed (out loud) when Drew said yesterday: …I did my first movie talk today…we spent about 5 minutes on just the first 2 seconds of the video and 30 minutes on 20 seconds…. Then I thought about it. I paid attention when James said: …we don’t need an infinite number of activities, just a few heavy hitters
John Piazza shares this as he starts his academic year today: I am thinking out loud in order to psych myself up for my first day of instruction, which is tomorrow, so please bear with me. Ben has said, echoing Krashen, that if we consciously approach a class with any sort of linguistic ulterior motive
Drive the Instruction in the Direction of the Kids’ Interests Read More »
Here is another training video! I am so happy. There is such a need, especially, for elementary discussion. What impresses me most about this excellent video is that Diane has clearly been able to integrate all the information she has heard from middle and high school modern language teachers and bridge them back and apply
James reports in on a MovieTalk class on this Tuesday morning: Ben, Talk about serious minutes of intense CI: MovieTalk can take a long time. Today in my 3/4 class we started the “Mickey Mouse in No Service” clip that was recommended a while ago. We must have spent 15-20 minutes on just the first 15
So here’s my effort at a video on CWB made from my basement as per recent discussion:
