In our last training class on Saturday, Denise mentioned how Padlet can be used to share the written version of a tableau in Phase 1 of the Star. Then Karin shared that the teacher using Padlet can also record her voice to add to the written version. Why is this important? It is because if […]

When I arrived in 2015 to use CI to teach middle school French at the American Embassy School in New Delhi, India, my CI instruction by kids who had studied French in previous years was largely met with choruses of “Can we just do worksheets?” or “We learn better with worksheets!” Hmmm…. It didn’t discourage

The Ultimate CI program is designed: To fully align with the research. To fully reflect the Communication Standard. In order to accomplish that in the world of actions and not just in the world of words (many CI programs lie about what they do): It is designed on and based in a feeling of community

Here is an article from 2015 that addresses the equity piece (which is the book I’m currently working on due out in the fall). I included the comments made on the original post, so it’s a long read, but may be of interest to some patrons who may agree with me that proficiency gains are

I don’t know if you heard about the Spanish teacher in a school in New York who gave the students worksheets with racist/pro-White sentences to translate. It’s a disaster, but the article missed the fact that the very fact of giving students worksheets in the first place is a disaster. Not that that’s something that

I know that things are confusing about accessing old posts and I’m working on that. It should be straightened out soon. Meanwhile, here is an article from 2015 that addresses the equity piece (which is the book I’m currently working on due out in the fall). I included the comments made on the original post,

  High school language departments usually anoint themselves as judge and jury of the middle school teachers who feed them their students. Their message is and always has been that if rising ninth graders show up at their doors “unprepared” to do the grammar work in their freshman year (they seem to be most concerned

Most language teachers who check out CI end up finding something wrong with it. But if the best research we have on language acquisition points to CI as the way people learn languages, then what are they finding wrong? They are probably finding things out about CI that they don’t like. They are also probably

In a comment tonight, Denise asked about the Self-Study Course. I thought I would answer that here as a post so that others can know about it.  Denise, by the way, is an advanced Ultimate CI teacher who has taken the Zoom trainings on both books and has become adept at the approach. She has

The visual activity of reading activates the visual cortex in the back of the brain. Currently in the CI movement, reading is done far too much in level 1 classes, with the result that CI is floundering.  It is because the way the brain functions to acquire language depends on huge amounts of auditory input

I wrote this to Sean today in the comments section but it is of sufficient importance to repeat here: Sean what you say about reading here is of immense importance. Years ago I suggested to my colleagues here in DPS that those novels HAVE TO GO, and since there have been and still are people

Most language teachers continue to think quite naively that if their students can translate some words in the target language into English, or spell a verb, then they know the language. But what they do they actually know, having memorized such lists? Students who memorize lists of words or verb conjugations and everything connected to