I wrote this on gesturing also in 2007 – on May 26, 2007, in fact: In stories, the three words serve the purpose of blasting the class off, so to speak. When you sign and gesture at the beginning of a class, three signs for three structures, you are creating a culture of signing that […]
I got these questions: Q. What do you think of the idea of teaching students the American Sign Language sign just for the structure words and not for all the other words that students offer when asking a story or otherwise? This way, they would be getting a lot of ASL words that they could
In TPRS, as in any narrative method, we don’t need a lot of tricks. We just need to make ourselves understood, using those skills that work best for us. For me, it is word wall work, point and pause, SLOW, trips into the bizarre, and mega-personalization, and circling. It may be other skills for others.
Drew describes how he scaffolds into writing with his students, then Jen asked a few questions for more details. It’s a good exchange with good details from Drew, so I am reprinting those comments (in edited form) here as a blog post for ease of reference. I am still not clear on how the thesis writing
I got this question in 2007 on the list and wrote the response below. By the way, I went back and searched “gesturing/gestures” here and if you do a search on that or click on the gesturing category you can read about five articles on that topic. I say that bc, among all the changes coming
Ben, I just learned that the Mandarin teacher at my school will not be returning next year. This would be a full time position, full time being four sections, grades 5-8. Classes are small, probably 10-15. The administration and the language department are very open to CI approaches. Teachers have a very generous budget for
A few months ago Bob Patrick brought up the subject of four percenters here: https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/04/23/4ers/ Here is a follow up to that article by Bob: It occurred to me today that I have found an answer to a question I asked several weeks ago: who are the fourpercenters? How do we describe them/know them? They
I often repeat the same exact question three or four times in a row using different emotions. One would think that this would bore the kids, but the kids can be fooled into decoding the same sentence multiple times by asking them questions in different ways using different emotions. C’est vrai?/Is that true? said in
Here is another poem written by the Persian master Hafiz. It is taken from The Gift, translated from the Persian by Dan Ladinsky. DROPPING KEYS The small man builds cages for everyone he knows, while the sage, who has to duck his head when the moon is low, keeps dropping keys all night long for the beautiful rowdy prisoners. When we treat students with
Four NYU grad students came to instruct our faculty in cultural sensitivity in a day long training last week. Fortunately, none of the faculty had much to do since it was the end of the year. Just kidding. But one of the grad students, Tanya Leslie, was excellent, and she was the one I got to
These two articles make me think that gesturing in TPRS may be underrated. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071104191551.htm http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/004434.html
I’ve always wondered what language represents. I was told in college that words are symbols, like the word chair is a symbol for a chair, or the word liberty is a symbol for what we think of as freedom. Something like that. When I hear the word chair I think of the thing. I image
