I’m having something of a renaissance with Vygotsky. I personally have mined all I can from Krashen and see Vygotsky as perhaps the one researcher who can help us more with the new challenges brought by COVID. Frank James Johnson has said, “A Zoom CI WL classroom has much the same potential for language acquisition as its
Someone once asked this truly important question a few years ago, so this is a repost: I need help! I have a VERY challenging group of Spanish 1 at the worst time of day. They are energetic but compulsively talk chatter and joke with each other. They came with a reputation. Anyways their card talk
Rule 2 of the Classroom Rules has been getting a lot of attention, but Rule 1 is of equal importance: Listen with the Intent to Understand. Such an obvious behavior is rarely done by students in schools. They listen with the intent to get a grade. If your students think that school is a game
This is an individually created image (ICI). The post is directed to Maya and Sean. ICIs to me are better than OWIs and student cards to move to increasing in our language classroom social awareness and lead to discussions about inclusion: Name: Daisy the Flower Job: To wake the family in the house next to
I remember how I had to fill out forms that detailed what I was going to teach in class that day. I should have just written that I was going to use the language to try to build community, so that I could address the standard of Communication. But I couldn’t just teach Communication –
I worked myself into a frazzle for twenty four years in South Carolina before moving to a middle school in Colorado where, thanks to Susan Gross and Blaine Ray, I found the treasure of comprehensible input instruction (then in the form of TPRS) that instantly brought me a relative degree of joy in teaching. Back
A repost: Our national parent organization, ACTFL (the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) says on their website that “the ability to communicate with respect and cultural understanding in more than one language is an essential element of global competence.” It may be true – global competence may be a worthy goal, but
It is the very lack of ACTFL’s providing teachers with ways to implement a curriculum that leads to the building of community – real human communication – in my classroom that caused me, over many years of teaching, to feel somewhat crazy all the time. I wanted to communicate with my kids instead of just
Our national parent organization, ACTFL (the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) says on their website that “the ability to communicate with respect and cultural understanding in more than one language is an essential element of global competence.” It may be true – global competence may be a worthy goal – but doesn’t
If a child feels that they are a valued member of a classroom community, they will acquire the language. But many kids haven’t the slightest idea what being in a classroom community even means. It is due to the fallout from being in schools, where building classroom communities can’t compete with the teacher’s need to
How to speak to our students in a way that uplifts? It’s so simple. First, we must of course speak so slowly to them that they understand effortlessly (Krashen). We know we are doing this when it is painful for us to speak that slowly – because when we speak so slowly that it is
How to build up damaged kids so that they are happy members of our classroom communities? How to make our students want to be in our classes and slowly, via trust in us and in the way we are teaching them and in their peers, become productive members of our class community? The strategies –
