Here’s a plan to combat the daily burden that weighs so heavily on too many CI teachers’ shoulders when they try to use it in schools and find that it might be easier to fight a rabid dog. If you are a French teacher, get the Eli Blume Deuxieme Livre and teach from that book.
The unbridged chasm between TPRS/CI and school settings – despite over 20 years of trying to bridge it – remains wide. This has caused heartache. Teachers have kind of driven themselves crazy trying to make CI work in schools. Careers have failed. CI works fine, but I have quietly wondered, for at least ten years
For well over 25 years, we in the CI movement have been grabbing onto CI like it’s some kind of special prize that if we only work hard enough to master, we can turn our teaching around and have a great career with super-engaged students and everything will be wonderful. Now, I propose that we
The best stories exhibit questioning sequences that resemble a bell curve skewed to the right, with the action moving slowly up to where it is most intense in levels 5 and 6 and then tapering off rapidly from there. One way to get rapid closure to a story is to ask if the story will
My dog really perks up her ears when I say words like “chicken” and “beef”. The concern and interest she shows on her face when I say those words is probably a universal look of inquiry among dogs. She wants more information. But when we give word lists to our students, expecting them to take
It was Mr. Rogers who said that we “don’t need to put on a funny hat to communicate with a child.” I spent many years working hard trying to make sure that things got funny in stories. I would think outside of class of ways to bring in a certain celebrity, or some fact about
I made a funny: We are like dogs trying to help all of the language teachers who still have their feet planted firmly in the grammar translation methods of the past century. We are C ing I dogs.
Q. A teacher wanted to use the Invisibles Extend phase strategy of interviewing students and so she came up with some personal interview questions for her level 1 and 2 classes. From there, she wrote a list of grammar items that they would naturally need to use (possessive adjectives, etc.) to answer that list of
I got this today – thought I’d share it with the group. My responses in italics: Q. Today in my Spanish 2 class, I had a student name his ICI “Mike Hawk”. I didn’t get the nasty joke until I read it in front of the class and everyone snickered and laughed. I realized what
At 16:38 in the video President Obama says, “We want children…learning about their language and learning about their culture.” This is wrong. We want them learning the language, not about it. We realize that the culture cannot be transmitted to new generations without some kind of vehicle – language. At 20:00 the gentleman explains about
Story Listening can save the Lakota language. Study this: http://www.welovedeutsch.com/story-listening
There is a tendency to think that the solution to save Native American languages is somehow different than just doing CI. But the young children of the Lakota and other indigenous peoples don’t need some kind of special instructional experience that is different than students of modern languages receive. The solution is not different because
