There was a girl who was failing all her classes. She dressed in black everyday with black lipstick. But she was thriving in my CI classroom – actually she was the class superstar. She told me, when I asked once if I was going slowly enough, “Mr. Slavic, do you know how you can ride a bike […]

This is from Craig in Los Angeles: Hey Ben – Just wanted to drop in and say hi. I’ve been seeing the information about your events and am so happy that people are showing interest in changing this field. Unfortunately, I’ve been kind of taken out of it. I am still at the same school,

Tina reports: …today I got back into teaching finally. I told them a story of a giant and his garden. Then seventh period came in and begged me for a story with their Invisibles. It made my day. I dug out two pickles from the pike drawn separately on two different days by two different

We finally have set a new protocol for our instruction. It is based on a mix of One Word Images, the Invisibles and Story Listening. Beniko says that roughly half of the first two and half of the third as a suggested use of minutes. There is no reason why we can’t use some of the

Kids lie. They really don’t all have 8’s on those hand comprehension checks. They have 6’s and, were some of them to be completely honest, much less. It’s because we go too fast. But we accept that lie and go on. Silly us. SLOW takes that lying factor out and so guarantees inclusion by all

Story Listening is simple. You tell a story. You use the marker to draw it as you say it. The kids listen. They don’t test on any of it. They don’t talk. They don’t count reps. They aren’t being taught words from some targeted list, semantic set, high frequency list, to prepare them for a

Sometimes the right sequence of questions we use can lead us seamlessly into a story. When that happens, we hardly even notice that we went from an image into and through a story. At a workshop in St. Louis this week, three St. Louis teachers teamed up to demonstrate how this can happen:  Monica developed

Our group member Bobbi Robledo shares: I work at Jefferson Academy Elementary School in Broomfield, CO. I am loving teaching here, where the administration is behind CI methods 100%. It is so wonderful being able to go to work every day knowing it is going to be a blast! Now we have an opening for

Krashen’s bold statement that language acquisition is an unconscious process is at the core of all we do in comprehensible input, and yet we forget that. But the fact is that we learn languages unconsciously, as per: https://benslavic.com/blog/2008/08/28/ci-oceanic-stuff/ https://benslavic.com/blog/2010/07/18/we-learn-languages-unconsciously-1/ https://benslavic.com/blog/2010/07/19/we-learn-languages-unconsciously/ SLOW is the principle vehicle for driving the learning into the unconscious mind. Why and

I apologize for not mentioning more often in these pages the fact that the nature of the change we are in right now is a quantum and not an incremental leap. It is such a big leap for us to grasp that we don’t use our conscious minds to learn a language. We keep running into

So the chef that is the unconscious mind in language acquisition does it all. When he makes the soup, bubbles form as it heats up and forms into tasty language. Those bubbles pop right into our conscious minds and we hear a constant flow of sounds in the new language that is kind of like what

Tina and I are working with a group in St. Louis starting tomorrow until Wednesday so we’re signing off here until next Thursday. Many of us are on spring break so enjoy!