I am opposed to assessment of speech – ever. We wait until it happens and then, when it happens, why assess what they say when we can just enjoy it? Why assess when the goal of the class is to teach them the language so that they can profit from knowing it in a million […]

The most troubling times for me as the moderator of this site have been when I have felt that I had to kick people off the PLC because they were trying, I am sure without knowing it, to inflict a certain single position on the rest of us that threw our general discussions out of

Over our ten years of sharing ideas together here, we have gone through many changes. We have argued, gnashed our teeth, celebrated accomplishments, complained, talked each other off the ledge, etc. We have changed and grown, without even really noticing it, as one watches a child grow into an adult without really noticing the extent

Here are two more reports from teachers on how they use the Invisibles. The first is an eloquent description, the second only an image, but it’s a whopper in that it mixes an invisibles character with an actual kid in his (Kyle Carr’s), which I think is just bodacious and wonderful. I love the idea

Well the Invisibles are a year and a half old now, thereabouts. Tina was the first to extensively test them from January through into spring last year (2016) and she really hasn’t stopped. Without her co-authoring the book on the Invisibles, A Natural Approach to Stories, it would never have made it into print with

Meg Prossnitz in the Chicago area (Des Plaines/Schaumburg) is looking for a couple of Spanish teachers who specialize in CI: Hi Ben, Our dept needs 2 Spanish teachers for next year and we would LOVE someone with TCI experience – could you ask the blog community? Anyone interested can send resumes to our principal, harrington.john@ccsd59.org.

I got a confidence-building note today from one of the top students I have taught in my career, who may be the best of all over almost 40 years. She is German, and very demanding – in a good way – as a student because her processing rate is so fast, so it feels like

Our own Steven Ordiano in Fresno, CA has composed the first Invisibles song: Tu Le Sais. It is so French – it has that sound. We might hear this playing in a pub in France. Students who hear songs about invisible characters that they invented are more likely to want to listen to them than

How true are the statements below? I need feedback for a Bite Size Book I am writing on activities to start the year: We only do “extreme staying in bounds” and avoid sliding any new untranslated vocabulary by the kids for a few weeks into the academic year. Once the students have activated their brains

Our long time friend Don Read has retired. He has been a member of our group for at least seven years and hosted our San Francisco workshop last year. One thing I noticed about Don is how he so quickly embraced all the little details of this work. He had a No Bullshit radar thing going

Tina gives a heartfelt response to Terry’s morelist position on SL: Terry you write:  después de que el idioma se haya ido de la mente del que escucha, For this not able to read Spanish, this means “after the words that the learner heard have gone from the brain” i.e. saying that in SL the learner

A repost: We’ve never gone deep with the equity piece. We have discussed it, but never enough. We have ignored it, mainly under the weight of so much change in so many other areas or our work over so many years. However, this summer at Cascadia the equity piece will be one of the main