Ben Slavic

A Year from Now

Let’s say it’s a year from now and it’s a Thursday morning in March of next year (2023), and you’ve been using the Star in your language instruction for about a year now, having signed up for both the Book 1 and 2 trainings a year ago back in March of 2022 with great results, […]

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Ukraine – 8

Hello, Ben! We are in Germany near Berlin at my sister’s friend’s house. Everything is good. Waiting to see who’s available to drive with me to Portugal. We were blessed to get out on time. We had a sleepover in Vinnits, – it was calm at the time but 2 days later it was bombed

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Upcoming Trainings

I’m doing two trainings this spring on the Ultimate CI Books 1 and 2 and the new StarSystem™ approach: Book 1: April 2 – May 7 Book 2: May 14 – June 18 These trainings are all on Saturdays from 12:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. MT.  The cost per training is $189.95 for non-patrons. Patreon members

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ESL/EFL

I’ve been working with Marcel who is a teacher of English in Morocco with primarily intermediate students from Russia. We may be nearing some kid of much-needed breakthrough in reaching this population of language learners. I think we’re in the process of “purifying” some of the research on this. I won’t go into it  here.

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An Editorial Comment

Where did the fears around building stories come from? They originated in the early days of TPRS when Blaine Ray could and did create a story with seemingly no effort, but nobody else could. Any TPRS old-timers reading this know exactly what I mean. It got so bad that whenever people showed up at a

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AP is Bullshit

I just had a sad thought about those AP type students we teach. We teach them all sorts of boring stuff, the stuff that they “need to know” for the AP exam, and then expect them to be able to enjoy the language learning experience.  But how can they enjoy our AP classes when all

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Ukraine – 6

More from Victoria: Well we’ve been driving since 7 am, it’s 4 pm now. Skylynn is getting restless, the rest of the kiddos fell asleep, thank goodness – haha! Mi sister, the mom of other two teenagers here, is coming to the border from Germany to meet us then we all go to Portugal. You’re

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Ukraine – 5

The latest from Victoria and the Three Angels: Hello! We left Kremenchuk 2 hours ago. Should be arriving to West Ukraine in like 12 hours plus huge traffic near the border. Everything is fine. There are checkpoints here and there, Ukrainian soldiers stop the cars. And of course me having an American car with an

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Quizzes

When we use the StarChart™, we do not require kids to memorize anything, the students are not bored , and yet we are able to collect grades, which we can’t avoid doing since we work in schools.   When the Star is used, the students know that they can get a good grade in the

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Conflict

In any field, if the curriculum* conflicts with the research, then which one should change? *By this term I mean both the textbook curriculum and the new half-baked CI curriculums out there that rely too heavily on readers.

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