Ben: Teach what’s up. If one sentence is up but hasn’t been acquired, don’t leave it. Why would you leave it? It hasn’t been acquired yet! If a sentence has some new grammar concept like the sound of the future tense vs. tenses they are used to, stay with it. Just hone that sentence. Craft it. Repeat it more than […]
Here is a question: Hi Ben! I am looking for TPRS materials/stories in German for 4th and 5th grade. I find that the stories about teenagers are just not at their level. Can you guide me? Do you know of anything available? THANKS! Tami Canale, EdD World Language Coordinator American International School of Budapest
Last week we were using (from Matava): Allons-y!/Vas-y!– Let’s go!/Go ahead! veut tellement l’embrasser – wants so much to kiss her s’est endormi/s’endormit – went to sleep So to begin the 53 minute class I had to PQA these, I first asked myself if they have power. All three did. Next I had to figure
If kids don’t give you cute answers in PQA, then TELL them what is going down in class. I call it PSA – Personalized Statements and Answers – and I do it all the time. It works with flat classes because our students are children and need to be told sometimes. Thus, if you ask,
Just FYI, Chris has been asked to present in 2014 in St. Louis as a Central States Conference “All-Star” because his recent session at CSCTFL this spring was received so enthusiastically. That really is quite an honor for a young teacher just starting out. If you remember, his session was about staying in the target language.
Here is Greg’s bio: This is my second year of teaching and my second year teaching French at Northern High School in Durham, NC. I’m the only French teacher at my school so I teach all levels. This semester I’m teaching two combined classes (including level 2 through AP) and one class of French 1.
This is news from Greg. For those who aren’t familiar with Greg, he’s the guy in Durham who started doing CI instruction like a month ago and has rocked his classroom every day since then. In this Report from the Field he shares with us a rather surprising development in his career: In case anyone’s
Today I have posted five of these posts on how languages exist and are acquired in the unconscious mind. The reason I did that was to keep reminding us here in the group that languages exist and are acquired in the unconscious mind. I don’t think that many of us yet get that. And when we
Our purpose in this game of teaching comprehensible input is to teach the structures. We focus more on them than on the content of the story or the PQA. Content is merely secondary to the CI process – the structures are everything. The content of the PQA or the story is merely a delivery device
Every few months or so I get wigged out about how Krashen has pretty much shown that the acquisition of a language is an unconcious process but we set much of it up to be a conscious process in class. Even people who claim to be CI teachers do that. But they are not honest with the research.
What is unique is that Steven Krashen used empirical studies to arrive at conclusions that are largely intuitive. This odd phenomenon in research can be likened to the work of Carl Jung, a researcher whose conclusions went far beyond the merely observable and were therefore subject to (silly) questioning by the more rational but far more boring,
A colleague recently wrote in response to my comment that people who focus on output instruction would be better off to quit the teaching of languages and go find another profession: …so apparently that makes me someone who has no place in this community and should find another profession…. I have been thinking about this comment. It’s
