Ben Slavic

Sabrina shares this great news from the moretprs list about our own Michael Miller. Of course, Michael worked with Susan Gross in the 1990’s at this same school. Whenever I observed him his kids were in a constant German environment, lots of PQA, lots of physical response with kids diving under desks and stuff. Fun to […]

This is a great article from Sabrina illustrating and defending rSF. It puts to shame any other idea in language education about how to teach lists of sports and other thematic units. THIS is the way to teach lists of sports, pastimes, etc. if it is acquisition you are after. We do not learn languages by memorizing

Think of some of the best classes you ever were a part of, as a student or as an instructor. Were they all planned out, or did they kind of direct themselves? What was the feeling in those classes? Was there a serious tone, or one of excitement, with some humor and a certain kind

Here is an important article from Robert Patrick to the Latin-Best Practices list. It goes into detail and is an excellent addition to our already strong set of articles in the R and D category: Of all the practices currently developing in the larger practice of Comprehensible Input, Reading and Discussing (R/D) in Latin was

Sharon has a kind of complex question: Ben, I’d like to know how you handle new students who transfer into your class in the middle of the semester with no background with TPRS. How do you do it without translating every single thing you are saying? I teach only Spanish 1 and 2, and so

From John: Last week, in an email exchange among our little Latin CI cohort, Bob wrote this: “Breathe.  Enjoy what you are doing today. Make sure (Dave also reminded us) that laughter has a chance of happening in every class.  It really doesn’t cost much, but the dividend is huge.” I would add, not only

As we continue to grow together as teachers, I am heartened by our continued focus not just on best practices in comprehension based instruction but also on classroom discipline. We have made such great strides on that here over the past year in particular. More and more, I see that the focus on discipline must go hand in

Here is a variation on basic sentence frames, using the same prompts of I went to  I saw  I received  I ate  I played  that were suggested by Robert in the first of this series of articles suggesting a good way to start back in after a vacation: After collecting the first batch of writing responses, which

I think that the power of Robert’s idea of sentence frames (see previous two articles here on that topic) is significant, especially to use after a vacation. I didn’t think it would be when I started them on Tuesday, but it is as elegant a form of CI as I have seen, and is highly

Group member James Hosler has given me permission to share this email with the group. It warms the heart to read stuff like this: Ben, I have noticed a lot of anxiety on our end lately about administrators and snotty kids. But it’s always good to get reminders of how good TPRS and CI really are,

This is from John Piazza and thank you John: Guys, This article sheds some light on the challenges facing a unique subset of our students who are from low socio-economic backgrounds–the 4%ers who end up getting full rides in fancy colleges–or into 4 year colleges at all. It tells a fascinating narrative of three super-motivated

There is a very fine thread going through this bigger thread about writing and connected in particular to the thread about Sentence Frames. It’s a subtle point we need to not let go by in our general discussion about writing. The topic is how to process the writing. I spied this only because of what Robert