I think we get unnecessarily fooled by the method. It’s not all that hard. Circling is overated, in my opinion, and not as big a deal as everybody makes it as long as we have these other three things of SLOW, Staying in Bounds, and Checking for Understanding. I think that our focus should be […]
I’m working on some absolutely kick ass lesson plans that use all the jargon and yet align with CI instruction. When they are done I will publish them here.
In French, “À vous la parole” means it’s your turn to speak. So what I do often in class now is just say that and if anyone wants to speak, like to repeat what I just said, they can do it at that time. Or anytime – they can just say whatever they want. No
A graduate student from the University of Denver is spending time in my class these days. She saw the SSR going on of Houdini that I described in the previous article here. She asked how I hold the kids accountable for that. I told her about the test on Friday and basically how FVR didn’t
The old way of doing 10 minutes of FVR didn’t hold the kids accountable for anything. It is definitely a concept with a firm foundational footing in Krashen’s research but, as Kevin pointed out to start that thread on FVR a few days ago (and I agree with him), the fact is that the kids,
This report from Bob was written mid-week last week. I should post reports from the field sooner, I think, so that they are more current. I can just bump them up in the queue. My experience here mid-week seems to be a good place and set of circumstances to report simply because I would be
Notice the war comparisons. Not an accident. We are in a war. We are being wounded. We get most wounded when there is a combination of philosophical attack from within the department (in my case 8 of 10 of were against me), and administrative attack from the top when they find out (wrongly) from the department that there is
Robert wrote in a recent comment about DLI: …[At DLI] if someone misses more than two or three days of class, they are dismissed from the program (I know of people who missed because of illness; that doesn’t matter, they missed and therefore were dismissed.)…. While reading those words I suddenly, in proustian fashion (I just wanted to
A gem of a field report from Kevin: Hello all. I’ve just rounded out week 3 of the year, and have to extend a big thanks to all those who have posted/commented here. I’ve gleaned so much already in just a few weeks time, and I know that its helping me each and every class
MB sent this: My principal just sent a database of lesson plans from the federal govt. I looked up “language arts”, delved deeper, and found this site: “How People Learn Languages”. I am not done reading and digging, but it seems interesting for CI based instruction: http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/linguistics/learn.jsp
Skip I know that I am posting on the weekend. I know that our agreement is to take a break and let people read back articles on weekends. But the queue is really jammed. So I will post more this weekend and try to follow our new “weekend rest” policy next weekend. Really, August/September is
Chris tried to comment on the thread below but got 404’d so as I do when that happens I just publish the comment as an article: I’m commenting here to try to resuscitate this discussion that originated here: https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/05/08/request-from-chris/ The initial meeting that took place as an entire county thing didn’t go well. Our Director
