We welcome Stacey Gonzalez, Barbara Routledge, and Ana Garcia to the group. I don’t know Stacey and Ana yet. Barbara is a Nationally Certified Board Spanish teacher in Oklahoma whom I met years ago at a TPRS national conference. I’m counting on her to provide a strong anchor to the work we do here because […]

There is absolutely no basis for some language teachers’ insistence on doing something in a particular manner just because it’s the way they have always done it. Such teachers rarely even speculate that it might be interesting to try a different way to do things in their classrooms. They don’t want to change. Whenever they

General information for this training is below. If you want to have smooth sailing through the winter and spring, and be ready with a supercharged curriculum for next year, take this January class. Here’s the link with the details: https://benslavic.com/product/ultimate-ci-book-1-six-weeks-training/ And here’s the cool part, my patrons get the training at half price! DATES FOR

Circling doesn’t work. It’s old. Don’t buy into it anymore. If you feel that your recent teaching with CI has been boring, look to Circling as one of the causes. That and a lack of proper structure in your CI instruction. Circling came into the old TPRS/CI movement in 2005. I was there for that grand

Daniel Tiger is an innocent young tiger, very much like our students.  The result of our stubborn focus on the form of the language and on the way that it is built mechanically is that our instruction has become alarmingly mechanical. Tigers don’t do mechanical. They do natural.  We just haven’t provided our students with any

In the short video below, Lady  Elaina apologizes to Daniel Tiger for forgetting to visit him.  Should we not all have similar conversations with our students? Should we not now finally start to apologize to our students for forgetting their real needs as children studying a language and their needs to be treated in class

There is a lot of negative energy pulling us back to the textbook, but it will be short-lived. Don’t get fooled. The language teachers of the future will teach from their hearts and not their minds, since it is pretty clear right now that  the old ways of teaching languages are in their death throes.

One of our group members teaches Zulu language. I know – that needs a repeat – he teaches Zulu. I didn’t even know it was a language and so you can add my name to the legion of people who don’t know much about Africa.  But we can forgive ourselves and move on and get

It’s the lists that caused much of the confusion out there today about CI instruction. The traditional teachers couldn’t believe that lists weren’t needed to acquire a language. They couldn’t handle the radical thought that just CI is all that is needed for people to learn a language. Why? It’s because comprehensible input is the

Testing is a structure/form that absolutely strangles comprehensible input, whose benefits are hard to measure and different in terms of speed of acquisition for each individual student, since everyone processes new language at different speeds. But the fact that each CI student learns at different speeds didn’t stop the traditional movement from testing CI students

The problem in CI has always been that big gap, alluded to in the previous post, between what Blaine and Susie and Jason and the other super stars of the movement could do and what novice CI teachers could do. There was such a big disconnect between what the original reformers and innovators who had

We could sum up the first two articles in this series of posts on form and function in CI language instruction by saying that we have needed a CI curriculum that offers some kind of “form” within which to keep us “safe” as we speak to our students in the TL. We haven’t had that.  We