Jeffrey Sachs was asked what the difference between people in Norway and in the U.S. was. He responded that people in Norway are happy and that people in the U.S. are not. Extending this (what I consider to be a) fact about the two nations to the teaching of languages, we can say that many […]
Michel Baker is looking for an experienced TPRS coach in the Carolinas. What’s happening over there? Michel is in the Columbia, SC area.
It’s odd that the big textbook companies have held dominion over our profession for so long. It’s even more odd how the annual ACTFL conference, in spite of their statements about proficiency and use of the language in the classroom, has become merely an outlet, a big book sale, for corporate book and other (proven
Carol sent this in a few weeks ago but it is just making it to through the queue. I think it is an important reminder: Dear Ben: My French 2 class has been a little blah lately. With a forty minute period, I am sometimes loath to get actors up. Today I stuck very closely
It saddens me when the passion that some of us have for comprehensible input methods is misinterpreted as being some kind of boastful claim to expertise and superiority in the field. Just because we write and talk about what we do with such intensity and excitement, people latch onto that in oppositional terms and accuse
There are still some outstanding bios which we need to solidify our knowledge of who each of us is. It’s not paranoid to think that someone can just join, not say who they are, and report on what we talk about here. As ridiulous as it sounds, it has happened twice since this group became
Administrators must decide, lest they resemble the donkey who, faced with two equidistant haystacks, fails to decide on which one to go to for sustenance and so starves. The old way of using a book and speaking English and the new way of using Krashen’s ideas of interesting comprehensible input in the target language cannot
Many know Kate Taluga from NTPRS. She works with preserving Myskoke language in Florida and is part of the Oklahoma group as well, since her People were one of those native groups split between those two states. Her kids are showing growth with the language as expressed below: Ben, Yesterday my kids performed on stage
[ed. note: this is a recent comment by Robert. It connects to a somewhat confusing term (confusing at least to me) introduced around 2009 by Krashen – transparency. In an effort to locate the discussion of trasnparency into one accessible place with the keyword transparency in the blog title, I have moved various related texts here as a single blog
Carol has a question: Hi! Could you throw this out to the techie folks? I am thinking about using Google Voice to record my upper levels short speaking assessments. I am getting some push back. One young man is afraid of having his information compromised by Google saying the site is wide open. In other
When the story script we are using is too busy in the first location, time keeps us from getting to the other locations and we lose all that chance for lots of repetition of the target structures. Many people take this as a matter of course, but the second and third locations do for us
I was discussing with my coordinator (at the university) my ideas that using tprs could help us with our lower level retention issues, particularly with minority students. She always wants to “see the research” on things, wants data, wants statistics. Wants to know if there has been any long-term research done showing whether tprs students
