Ben Slavic

Nathan Beck

We have a young scholar in St. Louis whose awareness of the research and spot on grasp of the difficult issues confronting us seems to go well beyond his years. Here’s Nathan Beck’s bio: Hey Ben, Here’s my bio that’s taken me forever to write. Sorry about that! Hello, all! My name is Nathan Beck

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Latin is Easy!

Ben, In the general atmosphere of negativity that always comes up this time of year, I’ve caught from my first and second year students the general perception that “Latin is easy.” Several students have said this to me personally and I’ve heard it whispered in various contexts as well. Of course this is always contrasted

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Cheerfulness

When people think of language classes, consciously or unconsciously, they think of the textbook, the conjugations, the rules of agreement about parts of speech that the kids grasp but vaguely. They remember that some kids weren’t interested in all that, and they draw the conclusion that kids don’t want to learn. This is simply not

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Jeff 7

This picks up on the Jeff thread. It is from John talking to James. I am in hearty accordance with him about the reading suggestion, and not just because I believe in the raw unbridled power of reading to bring unexpected huge language gains, but also bc just about everyone is crawling to spring break

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A Single Method

The influence of Miriam Met and Helena Curtain and people like that can still be seen in this point from John: Hi Ben, On page 10 of this month’s issue, there is an article “Five Common Mistakes Language Learners Make.” This is a condensed version of an article by a EFL instructor Ann Merritt in

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Retell Example

We encourage kids to speak when they want. We don’t force them to do so. That means that in a story, during the story or at the end, we can ask a kid to recycle the information up to a certain point in the story (recycling) or retell the entire story at the end. If

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