It helps to be happy in this work. No. We have to be happy to do this work. We are communicating with children all day! What happens if we communicate anything but happiness to them? I am sure that most of them already experience negativity from others in their days. Just taking a guess on […]
We try to keep our discussion here mainly about strategies/best practices, but a lot of talk gets in about how to deal with opposition within our buildings*. That’s fine. We need to be reminded often that there are a whole lot of people who are upset about the new trails we are blazing in what
The center part of a sunflower, where all the seeds are, can get full of seeds and get almost too big. That center part of the sunflower compares to the story, where each seed is another detail in the story. A story can get too big too. There is nothing wrong with that. Not so
From Alisa who teaches both Spanish and Hebrew in Chicago. Hers is an important question and maybe someone in the group can suggest a possible direction, although the questioner herself is a world expert in the field, but in the real way because she walks the walk every day in her classroom: Amigos, I was
From Jonathan: Ben- Got a few questions to throw out to the PLC, re: FCR (Free Choice Reading): 1) Do you use FCR @ the beginning of class on a daily basis? 2) If so, for how long? (include how long class time is) 3) What are your sources for reading material? 4) What are the
It’s interesting to me that some in our group are having success with the Big CI Book and others with ANATS and ANATTY, since they are different, the first one still retaining elements of TPRS/CI and the second ones being fully devoted to NTCI. It doesn’t matter. We work for success however we can find
Should I call what I do NTCI or Proficiency Based Instruction (PBI)? That’s all it is about…proficiency. Or should I call it something else? It’s non-targeted as anyone who has been on here since 2016 knows, but NTCI is just an awkward name to me and also invites the CI people to get oppositional. But
I know that on this site we have beginning of the year parent letters about what we do in our classrooms but it is so full of pages that I can’t find one. If anyone has one that they are willing to share with the group, please cut and paste it into a comment field
The purpose in NTCI is not to teach words from lists but to teach language from images. This keeps the focus of the learner on the language as a whole, and not on pieces of the language so that the students can pass a test on the words for the rooms in a house. Thus,
Dr. Lynch at Texas A&M wants to do a study with members of this group and we need some participants: “Dear PLC: I am seeing volunteers to fill out a survey regarding your perceptions and experiences using NTCI. The survey will require approximately one hour of your time. Your information will be anonymous. I believe
Hey Ben – Q. We made a OWI; the character was a potato. So all through the first questions I asked, Est-elle grande ou petite, etc., because pomme de terre is feminine. Then when we named it it turned out to be male. So now it’s Ricky, and I find myself switching to il–il est
Q. Hi Ben! I am a second-year Spanish teacher. In graduate school, I studied and trained in TPRS methods with a professor whose pedagogy was centered on comprehensible input in language acquisition. I am lucky to have had her! I admire your work a lot, and I have been experimenting in non-targeted CI this year.
