Greg asked here on Sunday night: …one question that I have is, has anyone asked Beniko Mason what she thinks about TPRS? Has she seen what is being done with the Invisibles?… Greg she told me and Tina in the fall of that “the TPRS ship needs to be righted”, and gave me to understand […]

Good news from Greg: Hi Ben,  I finally published my first FVR/SSR book: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/El-chico-salvaje-A-short-story-FVR-SSR-e-book-for-CI-Spanish-teachers-3510365 This is the direction I think I am going to go in…..cheap FVR books in which teachers can print as many as they want for their classroom.     I originally wrote this story while still tied to a textbook. I’ve always

Anne Matava’s new book is out (by Teacher’s Discovery) a collection of 97 of her best story scripts from the past ten years. If you already have the old volumes (1, 2 and 3), you don’t need this new version. The hardback version is only available from Teacher’s Discovery. The electronic version is available from both

The subject matter of this report from Sarah Downey is nothing new, regrettably. She is in a really backwards-looking school and requests help from the group: Common Assessment Analysis Here’s the story: Earlier this month my principal visited a school and came back with the form below that we all need to fill in monthly.

Hi Ben, Just sending along a fine first free write: I gave the topic, some coaching to the class on how to keep it simple…we had our lists of connecting words and our running list of action words from September…and ten minutes. This boy really stuck to what he knows and didn’t resort to English

Sean just giving you another rep on Steven’s sentence from last week. This gem is worth memorizing, as you said in your comment last week, so you can “repeat it every time I sit behind a desk from an admin. This is some juicy admin-ease. It strokes their backs while not compromising our approach.” Steven:

Our mental health is completely dependent on our knowing and remembering that we cannot teach a language, but only deliver comprehensible input.

In a comment here last night Alisa said that traditional teachers believe that teaching a language means that kids can: …[demonstrate] temporary mastery of [ certain vocanulary] terms on interval tests…. She goes on: …[traditional teachers typically] don’t look for or grade for demonstration of contextual comprehension – certainly not of extended chunks of texts

Part One – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vItnp6-1PjA Part Two – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzM09herNdE (I especially like the point that Tina makes at 1:55 to 2:15 in the first video calling out traditional teachers on how they hold students “accountable” to standards for certain vocabulary words when no such standards even exist in ACTFL.)

If you are feeling down about how hard this work is, here is a reminder of why we do it. The kids could be from any country, so that doesn’t matter. What matters is that these kids have hope in the future and pride in their heritage. They have hope and every adult in their

I rarely post stuff here that is unrelated to our work but this is just wonderful and in fact is good for our mental health bc laughter is so good for us: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/slippery-stairs-japanese-game-show_us_5a13fd14e4b0aa32975d8fc0?ncid=inblnkushpmg00000009

I was looking at some of the comments here from a few days ago. The following anecdote from Alisa kind of blew my mind: …I actually had the former head of curriculum say to me, when I brought to her attention that language acquisition isn’t conceptual like math or social studies and cannot be measured