Jeff Easthon in IL gave a survey to his students on FVR. He explains: Hey Ben – I gave this survey to all of my Spanish 1 kids. 109 kids did it. The novels I have are: BB dice la verdad Pobre Anna Felipe Alou Piratas BB vs Yucatan Robo en la noche Esperanza Noche […]

Got this from a group member: Hi Ben, I wanted to report a rare occurrence for me. My principal came to observe my French one class. He loved the classroom structures, the student jobs and expectations. However, he picked two students “at random” to monitor during our invisibles story. One student was just eating crackers

Jen said this in a comment yesterday in a response to the “Some Questions Become Like Old Friends” post from a few days ago: I am in a very similar if not identical situation. Everything you describe is also what I have to do. Same percentages and everything. I even had to spend a whole

This is a note to us from Alisa. In my view it sheds light on a part of the instructional caverns that people w testing mentalities may never have thought of – if it’s not fun then why do it? This is especially true of younger kids Alisa’, who are basically sending the message to

I got this oft-discussed question from a PLC member. It’s like a Zen koan. It’s good to revisit it from time to time: Ben – Do you know if any of the NT hard-hitters are working in a system that is locked into standards-based education? If they have to test kids on all of the

Q. I first purchased Susan Gross’s DVDs and saw lots of circling and reps. When I googled for TPRS I found your website and got two of your books: Stepping Stones & TPRS in a Year. I got the idea that you too advocated this kind of circling and reps. But in the PLC I

T1 is deeply embedded in the collective unconscious of teachers. Unpacking the language into parts is our default mode, and unlearning that is the real work of becoming a comprehension-based teacher. Grammar-translation and audio-lingual methods are the way the vast majority of us were taught, and thus it is the way we think subconsciously about

Q. I see that when you choose a character to use for a particular story it is usually just one kid’s character and the details they provided for that character. I’m wondering if it would work if the details came from different characters created from different students – a mix and match. This would replicate

Viola Davis in speaking about her profession said: “I became an artist, and thank God I did, because we are the only profession that celebrates what it means to live a life.” I would add that we in the field of foreign language education have a chance at getting in on that concept of celebrating

How is it that just a few favorite strategies like Questioning with Balls (formerly Circling with Balls) and One Word Images can be used over and over in all our classes if the “brain craves novelty”? It is because it is not the strategy that gets boring, it is the content, and with the strategies

Tina wrote this on the morelist today. It addresses the concern that Jeff brought up on Monday that non-targeted instruction brings us out too wide and thus lose the kids. It represents a good description of a reasonable position between the “Just Talk to the Kids” extreme and the Targeted extreme: In my view the

Q. How do we make sure that our students will hear the “important” words (some call them “high frequency”) if we go non-targeted? A. If we are teaching for whole-language mastery, then we need to unlearn or let go of the idea that we are teaching parts of the language. If the high-frequency words are