Ben's Blog

Use the search by date, or the page numbers on the bottom of the screen to search for posts as far back as 2010

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Eugene Williams

This article is about an old friend – Eugene Williams. He is pictured at the bottom of this article. Eugene was one of my assistant track coaches at Myrtle Beach (SC) High School. He mainly

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March 20th

A new Ultimate CI Book 1 class begins on March 20. There are currently 15 spots available in this class. When you sign up, here’s what you get: Twelve hours of Ultimate CI training over

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Observation Success!

Some of us have been following the process of being observed that Danielle has been going through lately. Here’s an update: Last week, she had the pre-observation with her principal. It was probably not unlike

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On Planning

It is my opinion that the word “planning” is just embarrassingly overused in our profession. Why, if we all gained fluency in our first language without a shred of planning, have we bought into the

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Can WL and ELA Be Brought Together?

Here’s a possible start in finding some common turf between ELA and CI instruction. Way overdue: There are many terms used to describe ESL/ELL and EFL instruction. For now let’s just use the acronym ELA

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Question

Q. When you write in the board do you do write the English first? A. Yes and the Spanish below it. Then you draw a thick line under the Spanish to separate the new expressions from

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Tomorrow’s Zoom Training

This is a reminder for Group 4, Class 3. Prepare this from the Book 1 Syllabus: Class 3 – Saturday – 2.20.21 (12:00 – 2:00 p.m. Mountain Time) – Demo and Coaching.  Review pp. 17-66

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Flangoo

Over the years there certainly have been hundreds of posts here on the PLC about how CI interfaces with the reading piece. However, after studying the problem (reading is a problem in the CI community

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When Observed

For those using the Ultimate CI Book 1, the following eight steps can be used for when you get observed. So if you have a formal observation coming up this spring, I recommend watching these

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Kindle

My books are available as PDFs, which will open and can be read on a Kindle. You can use a registered Kindle’s “Send-to-Kindle” email address to send your PDF to your Kindle via email, or you

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Delay

If you’ve ever tried to update or overhaul a website, you know how much time it takes. The “free stuff” from my former site will for that reason be delayed for some months, as I

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When Observed – 1

If you scroll down to the bottom of the categories list, you will see both the “When Attacked” and the “When Observed” categories. These two were created to help teachers who are (a) undergoing any

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Time to End the Charade?

A great hypocrisy when an admin asks you during a pre-observation meeting “What will the students be able to do after the lesson?” is to answer it. The real answer to that question is “It

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When Attacked – 6

What about rigor? Some language teachers say that teaching using comprehensible input is too “easy” for the students and so they succeed too much, earning “too many” A’s. The answer to that question is that

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When Attacked – 5

The Chef Everything rests upon the main research idea that language acquisition is an unconscious process. Here’s an image to drive the point home: The unconscious mind is like a chef whose kitchen is located

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When Attacked – 4

The Chef Everything rests upon the main research idea that language acquisition is an unconscious process. Here’s an image to drive the point home: The unconscious mind is like a chef whose kitchen is located

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When Attacked – 3

Noam Chomsky Noam Chomsky said, back in the 1960s: “Grammar [is] acquired by virtually everyone, effortlessly, rapidly, in a uniform manner, merely by living in a community under minimal conditions of interaction, exposure, and care.”

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When Attacked – 2

A Big Pill The idea that we have no control over how languages are acquired and cannot think our way to acquisition is a big pill to swallow for many language teachers. After all, many

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When Attacked – 1

When we get observed, we often realize how truly out of touch our evaluators are. They don’t get the research. It makes for a very nervous few days of pre-observation and then the observation itself.

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How CI Works

Personalized discussion provides the glue for the process. During the class we don’t go out of bounds – we keep things simple for our students by only introducing new vocabulary in the form of reading.

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Mission Statement

You are welcome to share this with anyone who wants to more about your work with CI: Despite huge expenditures of public funds, most language students in American schools are failures in their study of

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Rigor – 2

According to the US Department of State, an academic program is rigorous when there is: depth and integrity of inquiry: Many teachers have expressed concern that there is too much curricular material to “cover” and

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Rigor – 1

If I’m teaching kids who are new to comprehensible input, I typically make four posters out of the facts below to help them understand how they should feel in a CI class. They deserve as

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Rant – 1

Yesterday I got some specific questions from a colleague and want to share my responses to him with the group. Sorry for the long rant. I do that sometimes, more for my own mental health

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Our Profession is Broken – 2

The way I figure it is that when we don’t include and encourage every single student, regardless of race or background, we will end up hating our jobs while at the same time trashing a

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Our Profession is Broken – 1

I’ve given up hope. Our profession  is broken and useless. It pretty much always has been. That is my conclusion after being in the field for 45 years.  If you disagree with this statement, if

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Another Parent Letter

Much of what we focus on here in our group is our mental health – it is a major topic. A big aspect of protecting our mental health on a daily basis is dealing effectively

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Our Students Are Young

There are a lot of readers here who are just getting started with CI. That’s great. But there are also many of us with strong CI experience to whom I would like to direct a

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Scope and Sequence

Our PLC member Frank James Johnson has said this about the Star Sequence: Scope: “Whole Language Instruction”  Sequence: “Spiraling Expansive Recurrence of Comprehensible Input”.  Of course, these blanket terms would freak out any admin who

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Middle School vs. High School – 6

Here is the letter that Danielle and I crafted, which you are of course welcome to copy and paste and rewrite if you are finding yourself in this kind of situation in your own teaching:

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Middle School vs. High School – 5

One of our PLC members received this email from a parent the other day. I asked and received permission to share it with the group. Hello Senora (name of teacher) – Hopefully things are going

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Middle School vs. High School – 4

Far too often, we CI teachers get challenges from our peers – teachers with whom we are supposed to be working on toward common assessments, high frequency verb lists, thematic and semantic units, etc. We

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Middle School vs. High School – 3

So the reversal of instructional priorities is moving now in favor of middle school teachers who use CI in their teaching. The high school teachers are being “outed”. It’s got a lot to do with

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NBA

I was watching “Inside the NBA” with Shaqille O’Neal and the “Round Mound of Rebound” Charles Barkley. On their Christmas show they gave away about 40 bicycles – placed on the set – to disadvantaged

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Chris Farley

Let’s do a good job of being language teachers, because we certainly don’t want our kids to end up living in a van “down by the river”….

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BLM – 3

Our bosses profess to want REFORM in education. We all looked to CI. That was the right place to look. But to our shame we largely ignored the equity/inclusion side of things. Maybe it’s because

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BLM – 2

To repeat the main point of the last article: how our students do in terms of language gains and how we do at our jobs is directly and deeply connected to how we address the

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BLM – 1

In recent years, the focus here on the PLC has been not only on CI but also on how we can use CI for better mental health. How can we plan less, rest more, have

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We Focus on the Message

I just made about twenty TikTok videos that all focus on one thing – that we learn languages by focusing on the message and not on the form of the language via worksheets and other

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Questions for Textbook Companies – 6

Of the many questions Robert asks of the textbook companies in this series of articles, this is my favorite: How does the textbook align with the current emphasis by Advanced Placement (College Board), ACTFL and

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Questions for Textbook Companies – 5

Robert continues with his questions for textbook companies. It would be nice if they would answer. But they won’t. Their involvement in education is not spurred by the same interests that prompt these questions from

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Questions for Textbook Companies – 4

Robert continues to adress Sarah’s original questions with some questions of his own: How do the textbook’s scope and sequence align with the Natural Order of Acquisition? Since language acquisition researchers (e.g. Noam Chomsky, Daniel

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Ultimate CI Training

The Zoom training on Book 1 of the Ultimate CI series begins this coming Monday, for those interested. Go to benslavic.com and click on “training courses”. If you want to really access what is in

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Questions for Textbook Companies – 3

In this third article in this series, Robert begins a series of responses to Sarah’s questions. Sarah had said: …the Department Chair has told us we are going to use Realidades. I used that book

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