I got this email a few days ago from Haiyun Lu, and am happy to print it here with her permission: Hi Ben, This is Haiyun Lu from Wisconsin. I’m a Chinese teacher in a local independent school and I teach 8-12 graders Chinese. Last year, I bought TPRS in a Year! from you after […]
DIGESTING INPUT and OUTPUT This is a hodgepodge of recent thoughts on the benslavic.com blog that I have tried to organize to help me think more clearly about input and output: Susan Gross: “My really BIG ERROR (How did I forget to put it down as number one or two???): Output. I thought that
Hi all, I’m pretty thrilled about this…a five-hour interview got almost everything right! Go to: thttp://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:c9kxm45_UTwJ:www.neaalaska.org/nea/sites/default/files/maraprilaktivist10.pdf+NEA+aktivist+michele+whaley&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESg4BoF42ao2_ZGeMgLJRDNjlNbQXQB3hLgKqk7rMgmKNHNQZkrEoudRXaGBj_FdP3QogFYoC9ftLjUf1KNYhAM-63gF_Yf2BFpsdXkgxJ07KDsrX0_tu1pbWjOThFlqlTR1oScm&sig=AHIEtbSHcF8M51EtVoDwkWvXT8rYCtdrDw and check page 5…or google “NEA Aktivist Michele Whaley” and the same thing will come up. The part that is particularly wonderful about this is that Katya presented at our local Bilingual Conference last week. I’d never been before,
Katya Paukova just spent four days teaching in Anchorage. If you haven’t watched her, find a way. She’s going to be a little less available for a while now, because of a full-time teaching job at DLI, so the moment there is an opportunity, take it. Katya taught an auditorium of 300 people Russian for
Michele Whaley – Learning From Katya In Anchorage Read More »
A picture is worth a thousand words. The link below – sent from chill – is worth a million scholarly articles about how we acquire languages. Chill asked us to …notice the correct use of the plus-que-parfait AND the passé simple!! The natural language of mother and child sent to me by one of my
When we first start the year, how do we view our students? Much effort has been made in TPRS® to really welcome students and to respect them as creative individuals. I know this to be true and do my best to apply it every day. In his book, Push Back the Desks, Albert Cullum describes his
If we need a lot of reps on the three structures before leaving the PQA and starting in with the story, then what happens when we do PQA for, like, 30 minutes and then we are stuck with only fifteen or so for the story, not to mention the quick quiz? Should we just stay
Jennifer Kelly shares below about how a return to circling more often has helped her. It is a good reminder, because we get caught up in so much during a lesson that we forget how many times the kids need to hear a structure repeated. I suggest that we all really focus on circling for
Another thing that has been working is to take a class that is reticent to speak, like my level fours (who still think that learning French means constructing it in written form and correcting spelling), and asking them to write a little story for the first ten minutes of each class, then collect it, make
I have been playing around with presenting the structures for a story embedded in a short dictation. I start the class with an easy and loosely constructed, roughly three sentence dictation with the target structures in them. It seems to bring a bit more focus to the presenting of the structures than just listing them, maybe
So many of the characters in stories and PQA are right off the walls. For example, in Picasso’s painting The Old Guitarist, of which I have a copy hanging in the room, the skinny white-haired guy is called ‘Jesus Stefanopolis’ by one of my classes. Just the other day he proposed to one of my
This week I have been cleaning, really really cleaning, out my house in preparation for a move. It’s not the kind of change we often volunteer for because we know how much needs to be done. Change is not for the faint of heart. In order to get to a new place, I have had
