Just focusing on delivering comprehensible messages to our students helps us ease into a state of flow in our classes.  Dr. Stephen Krashen suggests in his Forgetting Hypothesis that students should forget that they are listening to messages in another language.  This forgetting that the messages are in another language clears a path for the […]

Just focusing on delivering comprehensible messages to our students helps us ease into a state of flow in our classes.  Dr. Stephen Krashen suggests in his Forgetting Hypothesis that students should forget that they are listening to messages in another language.  This forgetting that the messages are in another language clears a path for the

Our goal is to make acquisition effortless for them. Thus, if the sentence is: Jacob was born on Sept. 29, 2006. Walk to Jacob.  Touch him on the shoulder.  Smile big.  Say his name.  If no one in the world is proud of Jacob, someone is now.  Next, walk back over to where it says

We become adept at becoming aware of what we are feeling intuitively as teachers. We learn to feel our way creatively and expansively through a class without a lesson plan. We learn that good language teaching is not all about teaching a certain thing at a certain time, but rather just spending time with the kids

Have the researchers figured out how many combinations of words there are in languages? Have they figured out the form it assumes in human speech? Can they predict the form that language assumes? I’m thinking not. I don’t see how they could, anyway. There are  too many combinations. So my opinion of language is that

I published this on the listserve about five years ago: The floorboards of our classrooms are rotting. How long have we waited for the final cave-in of each one! All of us will be dropped, all akimbo, each at the right moment for us, into the waiting underground lake of fluency. There, we will meet

Back in 2011 Robert Harrell offered this advice: One of the things we are supposed to do each day is write down a goal and agenda for every class every day. The goal is supposed to be in the form of “Students will be able to” (SWBAT). The idea is that if students know the

We did well with our quick responses to Keri’s question a few weeks ago. Now we only have, really, one day to help Steven Ordiano in Fresno with the following: Hi Ben, I would like to request feedback from the PLC with the following situation by Friday at noon, if possible. My instructional coach has

This article first appeared here in June of 2008: Jody Noble sent me, some months ago, a text written about foreign language education in our country by Dr. Jack Richards. Here is a portion of the text: “In the last decade or so language teaching has also been influenced by concepts and practices from the corporate

I was asked via email about the content of the Bite Size Books – what it looked like. I sent the person this example from our Bite Size Book of Student Artists, and share it here as well: Comprehension-based teachers sometimes get themselves all worked up with the challenge of providing repetitions of the language

Hi Ben, I wanted to give a report about how yesterday’s Open House went. Overall, it was a time to show off my French 1s freewrites with some supportive parents. However, harsh opinions were not too far away. I had a one particular parent who was adamant about me having to teach students skills like

Are there any AP teachers in our group who would briefly address the current state of the exam in terms of writing/grammar/essay requirements?