Now that my kids (preliminary testing of Two Strikes and You’re Out! has been far more promising than I had any idea it would be) and I aren’t playing the blurting game anymore (we’re just

Here are three comments from a recent thread here: First comment by Eric Herman: The high school program I send my kids to is SUPER traditional. 4 years of “mastery” of a textbook syllabus. Disgustingly

New job: the Creator of the Invisibles. This student draws and labels our class invisibles with details like foods they like, favorite color, invisible sisters and brothers, etc. (See “Jobs for Kids” category for more)

From Judy Dubois in France: There were about 40 teachers at the [TPRS] event in Utrecht and at least 10 of them told me they want to come to Agen. Kirstin and Iris* are lovely people,

From Eric Herman. This serious indictment concerns ESL teachers as well: From the 5 elementary schools which feed to 1 high school, only 5 graduating 8th graders skipped level 1 HS Spanish. 4 from the

From Tina Hargaden: Hi Ben, I am hoping that you can help me network on behalf of COFLT (the Coalition in Oregon for Foreign Language Teaching). I just finished helping with the COFLT conference and

From Angie. Big wonderful possibilities here to teach family relationships and body parts while keeping the kids totally focused on the message and not the words, which is how language acquisition works: Angie shares: “My

  I know that many of us are just now beginning reading on a more serious level after all the auditory CI of the first few months of school, but I just have to post

This from Nathaniel is gold, a must read. I made it into a Primer article. Of particular value is this sentence: …VP’s goal is communicative. The language is used to find out and share information

From Michele: Martina just sent me a link: Thursday talk shows with BVP!! https://billvanpatten.wordpress.com/ I’m going to be listening. Late, since it’s the start of my advanced class just then in Anchorage, but I’m excited

We continuously allow blurting. Who among us can dispute that point? We have come up with, over many many years, all sorts of tricks – a million ideas it seems like – to win the battle.

Our Steven Ordiano in CA joins a long list over the years of teachers here who over the years have had to respond to administrators who – despite good intentions – cannot seem to understand the

Robert expresses something that has been about two years in the making. I feel it is true: …I think there is a trend forming. I, too, used to stress over “bell-to-bell instruction”, making every minute

Here is something that Linda and I do from time to time with our students: Please address the following prompts: 1. What do you most enjoy about our class? 2. What activity do you feel is the

This idea of getting departmental language classes together in the same room in a kind of town meeting format led to the blockbuster breakthrough strategy here on our blog of Two Strikes and You’re Out,

This discussion about blurting is the most important discussion of all with no exceptions. Why do all this work to learn how to teach like this and then have some kid ruin it all by

Such a big discussion we have been having this year so far on blurting! I would like to continue it with an untested suggestion. I have a tripod in my classroom with big paper on

Strategy #4 – Word Chunk Team Game (WCTG): It would be nice for teachers if communication via language could be done via single words only; their jobs would be much simpler. Unfortunately that is not

If you are struggling with getting high energy at the start of class, this is definitely something you should look into. I have settled on starting my classes with this and it definitely works because

Lance requests advice from the group: Back in April I applied to a school expanding their language courses to 7th grade, and they hadn’t settled on whether to teach Latin, French, or Spanish. They went

From Diane: Hi Ben, Got this from ACTFL’s Research Special Interest Group. Would you share the link and info with the PLC? ~ Diane Colleagues: Please help us get a good response for this research study on second language

Angie has a question: Hi Ben, I wrote this in an email to Eric but realized that I’d like to put this question before the group… I had a good time with the video (The

This script was shared here in past years. It is from Jim’s script book Tripp’s Scripts, which many of us have and use a lot and which has a lot of holiday stories in it besides a lot of really

Hi Ben, From Keri: I have a question.  I watched all of Adriana Ramirez’s videos and I really like the idea of the additional step she added in between the TPRS verbal story and the

If you are thinking about a grad program in language acquisition that is Krashen-friendly, you may want to read this from Eric: “Here is what Krashen told me last school year about graduate programs: …I

What is more important? (a) maximizing instructional minutes in favor of CI, or (b) just having fun hanging out with the kids? My answer used to be (a). And it was an intense (a). I

I promised to post all of Krashen’s responses to my ROA article. Those 20 posts are what got me seriously rethinking CI in schools. Here is the second: Me: “The fourth step of ROA is doing

With stories, teaching a language successfully is very difficult, but it reaches any conscious student. Without stories, success is virtually impossible, and reaches only a few bright kids. You have to pick one of these.

  General caution for new people. The reason we do stories is to set up reading. Reading is our big gun. We do lots of fun CI but it is all to set up we a

Steven has a question: Hi Ben, I am writing for some help regarding how I can adapt my CI teaching for BTSA, a mandatory beginning teacher’s program in California.  In essence it is a program

Dr. Krashen states: There is nothing wrong with talking about grammar occasionally. Eric Herman stated my position about grammar and output very well on your blog. Even a dictation once in a while (especially as

From Tim Geerlings: Ben, Can you post the following question to the group? I have two students in my Spanish 2A class who will not, period, do freewrites. They are otherwise GREAT students, who pay

Jim Tripp: The public individual dictado. Ask a student to stand up and take dictation on the board for a single word or sentence. Chances are you’ll have to correct them on spelling which allows

Hi Ben, I hope you are well. I thought you might enjoy this excerpt that one of my students sent me below. I talked to my students a few weeks ago about how learning a

I don’t know if anyone is doing the Jump into the Space! activity, the eighth of the eighteen step Reading Option A sequence (one way to approach Step 3 of TPRS). I just started using it

In the next series of posts I would like to share with permission what Dr. Krashen wrote about the “Lowering the Affective Filter in ESL Classes” article posted here last week: https://benslavic.com/blog/lowering-the-affective-filter-in-eal-classes/ The text in

Dr. Krashen comments on the problem of skill building vs. CI: I understand the problem, and it will remain until we educate people about language acquisition, at least to the point where people understand that

This is a repost from nine years ago: Jody Noble sent this superb article by Garon Wheeler. It is the best article I’ve ever read on Krashen. It makes me realize how similar Krashen’s story is to that

Eric sent this interesting article: http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/2006._pdf_is_first_language_use_in_the_foreign_language_classroom_good_or_bad.pdf

This story by Greg Stout is a variation on  Cutting Down a Christmas Tree: wants to light a Menorah nothing happens Jill wants to light a Menorah. She goes into the bathroom. She takes a

A story script from Robert: Hi Ben, Here is a story script I used in my German 3-4-AP class. I got the inspiration from Anne Matava’s “I Should Have Done it Myself” script. Some things

On output and grammar: See my comment Sept. 22:https://benslavic.com/blog/blowing-up-alaska/ Krashen is not anti-any grammar and anti-any output! Grammar helps under monitoring conditions, can lower affective filters, and could even help make input more comprehensible. Output,

From Alisa: I was googling around some ideas to spare the kids another 30 minutes of my story spinning. I found this “How to draw a…” step-by-step website that works perfectly! The artist draws a

We need to listen to Eric Herman more carefully. He has repeatedly said here that teaching grammar is just fine as long as it supports CI. In my own CI world, since I was trained by

Jen has to figure out what to do with this by tomorrow so if you have any ideas pls. get ’em in a comment field below: http://cce.org/work/instruction-assessment/quality-performance-assessment/tools-resources We have a new teacher meeting tomorrow about

This was posted a week ago, but for those who may have missed it here it is again. It is far too important to miss, as we further redefine what the word curriculum even means:

We have years of posts on the topic of being observed and a category for it as well. Many of us go through a lot of angst when it is our turn to be observed in

I am working with an ESL teacher, Stephen Cook, in my school. We are trying to explore areas where ESL and TPRS/CI overlap. Our main current area of focus is the affective filter. Yesterday he

We must gesture the verb when we say it during PQA, all the time. We must constantly invite the kids to do the same. We can’t gesture the verbs in stories anywhere nearly as often

The text below by Alisa Shapiro is written about really little kids, but applies to all of us at all levels: “By ‘affective filter’ can we include such slippery states of being as, say, hungry, hot