I very much appreciate what Alisa wrote here a few years ago about nontargeted instruction, during those days when we were hammering out the NT piece here about seven years ago. It’s true. It’s what Beniko says and Krashen’s work indicates. Alisa also talks about Story Listening (Beniko Mason) here. If you are not incorporating […]
Here are some more thoughts about the new assessment rubric that we have been discussing lately: When I went to the ACTFL pages in my earliest efforts (2005) to break the useless and crushing-to-students ancient 100-point scale and develop a rubric that actually aligns with ACTFL and the Three Modes of Communication, knowing that my
Dana Miller-Kitch is the Canadian CI teacher who replaced me at the American Embassy School in the fall of 2016 in New Delhi, India. She had trained up over that summer on the Invisibles since she knew that she would inherit kids who were taught using them. This post shows how the team gestures in
A repost from January of 2014. It’s good to reflect on this topic from time. In 2013, Steve Krashen said (source below) that curriculum and instruction based on a grammar-based syllabus has the following problems: (a) the Natural Order problem – Krashen states that we do not know the Natural Order and even if we
Krashen on the Grammar-Based Syllabus and Non-targeted Input Read More »
Craig observes: I’m finding that classes with more native speakers can almost never make up a fun story together. Wonder why that is. It’s actually just one of my classes so far. There are only 3 or 4 non-native speakers and for the life of them they can not get interested in a story or even
This picks up on Jake’s comment: We cannot state enough that comprehension-based teaching is 100% different from other ways of teaching languages. It is different from what form-focused language teaching does. Focusing on form exercises our brains. It is conscious learning, much like memorizing vocabulary or conducting an experiment in science class or learning the
A while back I learned from a CI trainer, Valentina Correa in Chicago, a technique that the kids will love: Whenever a child successfully responds to any of the Director’s Cues prompts (at the end of a story between QL6 And QL7 or during Reading Option 7 (Reader’s Theatre), we present them with an Oscar!
My position on the question word posters is that they should be only written in English. There are two reasons for this: (1) if you point to the word and say it in the target language, with its English translation next to it, the students tend to tune out the word in the new language.
Got this from Bradley: Hi Ben, I had a short conversation with my friend that had so much to do with the work we do as second language teachers that it blew me away: My friend recently agreed to teach me to play the piano and we were listening to a few songs in the car
If you are starting free writes now, try to follow each of these rules: 1. Write without stopping for 10 minutes. 2. When time is up, count the number of words you wrote and enter the total in your bar graph. 3. No English words in the story except for names. 4. Keep the sentences
If it is true that language instruction in the U.S. is broken – across the board in general – then let’s not pretend (just because teachers are trying to make the research around comprehensible input work) that it’s working. My guess is that most language teachers are still mostly teaching using a 50 year old
Hi Ben, Your posts give me strength and make me stand taller. Solving the problems in our schools can only be done when we believe in ourselves. On your forum, you talk about our real individual problems, not to be solved but because they need to be seen. It’s about being seen, about being heard.
