There is a reason we have long summer breaks in education, a real one that only teachers and students can know. We need them in order to survive. Since ours is emotionally a most demanding profession, we must rest for long periods of time. What we go through during the year in our buildings, in […]
Carol sent this. It makes Krashen’s case against early speech output that much more compelling by substantiating the fact that the mind is always busy processing what it hears and trying to turn it, over years, into speech output, and doing so via the unconscious mind. The key thoughts here is the “over years” part and the
I think we should celebrate our successes more here with each other, to balance the hard work we do in the trenches. Here is a celebration from Robert: Hi Ben, It is so encouraging to hear from students, and I thought this might also encourage some of the ones who are struggling. One of our English
Chris Stoltz reports in with this: Hey Ben: A friend, Mark, while in undergrad was part of an experiment at then University of Calgary. He was asked to listen to a CD of a computer-generated, monosyllabic language while sketching pictures that appeared on a computer screen. (Mark said it sounded like slow simple Chinese: monosyllabic, with
Those following the thread about Bob Patrick’s upcoming classes on CI at the University of Georgia may be interested to see the course description. I made a category for it so we can keep up with how that develops, since it is probably one of the first of its kind at the university level in the United
Michele gives us an update on Movie Talk. For the previous thread on this important topic for next year, click on the category. Here is the update: Hi Ben, I was stunned to find out that iJFLT published an article on Ashley Hastings’ MovieTalk technique in 2006: http://www.tprstories.com/ijflt/IJFLTFall06.pdf Of course, I wasn’t doing TPRS your
Many of us start the year with CWB and OWI and Word Associations and the Word Chunk team game (https://benslavic.com/workshop-handouts.pdf). We need to remember to throw the right amount of TPR into that mix. It’s a deal breaker for the success of our year, along with the Classroom Rules and of course jGR. In a recent comment
Our own Trisha Schutzius is opening up a language school in her home in Fort Collins. Anyone in that area might be interested. I think that what Trisha is doing, and the way she has set up her webpage in particular, is a model for some of us who might be thinking of doing this
Angie has a only few days to prepare for an interview coming up on Friday, so make some suggestions. We have had this question before but I’m not sure where it we answered it. Angie maybe you could check here: https://benslavic.com/blog/wp-admin/post.php?post=20465&action=edit&message=1 Hey Ben, I’ve got an interview on Friday and I’ll be teaching a 30 min. class
Liam recently shared this sentence with us about talking with Helena Curtain at FLENJ: [Helena] gave a presentation at FLENJ as well, right before mine, in fact. Her presentation (her hallmark thematic unit – which I saw her give several years ago at ACTFL) included several disparaging references to “the TPRS crowd” and she ended,
The great value of having the artist’s work to refer to when doing a retell of a story, vs. not having it, is that when the students are focused on the images created by the artist, they completely forget the words and focus only on the meaning, and are thus certainly acquiring. Working with visual
Cheryl sent this: I saw this and nearly laughed out loud. It seems that new research indicates that telling kids stories helps them to remember things!! http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/06/04/why-teachers-should-present-new-material-as-stories/ Cheryl Cowherd
