Dr. Slobodan Aureliac Chzechzevsky has famously said: “If the heart is not involved, language acquisition is impossible.”

Grammar is like a rabbit hole that you go down into in order to avoid actual eye contact and back-and-forth, reciprocal sharing of ideas with your students that is NECESSARY for acquisition.  Let’s repeat that idea: Sharing ideas and communicating using words (the Standard) involves human contact and is not robotic in nature. The rabbit

Attached below is the new and updated version of the StarChart™. Thanks to Denise Lionetti for suggesting the changes added into Phase 1. The addition of the questioning levels there makes the process of creating an image more clear. 

It is easy to lose track of what is going on when you have five classes (or more!) and thus have to make five  trips around the Star in one day of teaching.  Usually, the students are very tuned in with where they are in the Star journey. This is especially true if they have

If you are not feeling very confident about how to go from QL4 to QL 5/QL6 on the Star, which is that dramatic moment when you decide in class to move from a tableau into a story, just state the problem (QL5) in one simple sentence and then the solution (QL6) in another simple sentence.

Some obvious reasons why TPRS/CI has failed in many if not most buildings: 1. The culture of the language instruction has accepted that teaching out of a textbook is normal. Since we all have come to accept textbooks and worksheets as “the way things have always been done”, we stay mired in the past. 2.

Teachers interested in the Ultimate CI approach are invited to join us here on Patreon for weekly UCI coaching sessions.  These are informal drop-in sessions from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. MT on Tuesdays and Thursdays (times chosen to accommodate people from both coasts) starting on Tues. Feb. 1.  For benslavic.com patrons only.

Natural targeting is a term I just created. It’s what we do in the Ultimate CI approach. What is it? Instead of pulling targets from word lists in textbooks (semantic sets, thematic units, high frequency verb lists, etc.) and then testing our students every few weeks as we do now, we use the questioning levels

I want to make sure that all benslavic.com patrons – even if they aren’t taking the current Group 9 UCI Book 1 training – get the video links to each training I do. It’s a perk only available to patrons*:  Ultimate CI Book 1 Training – Class 1 – January 8, 2022 https://youtu.be/0ldP_fUts1g Ultimate CI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCLzWnZbMoQ&t=139s

Robert Harrell once responded to a teacher whose administrator was of the opinion that her teaching was not challenging enough, not rigorous enough. If that ever happens to you, grab this text and give it to the person: I’m sorry to hear you are getting grief from your administrator about rigor. It sounds to me

Here is class 2 for Group 9, edited down to the good stuff: https://youtu.be/UCLzWnZbMoQ