Pat Hiller Stainke wrote this on FB. I wrote some of my own responses under them. Pat’s comments are in italics and mine are in regular print: …I’m an idea person, so it’s not hard to change gears or to come up with new stuff – but I feel a sense of urgency about handling […]

Computers can alter images. They can enhance them or distort them. I believe that by trying to make Krashen’s theories fit into school settings, we have distorted them. We have taken a beautiful face and put a very large forehead on it. That’s probably not what happened. Much good has been done to offer a

Robert wrote this a few weeks ago. I repost it here because it is so important, in case anyone missed it the first time: The comprehensible output (CO) hypothesis states that we acquire language when we attempt to transmit a message but fail and have to try again. Eventually, we arrive at the correct form

Beth McCune wrote on iFLT FB yesterday: Trigger alert: contains musings on untargeted CI. You may want to keep scrolling… Maybe the process of acquiring L2 is a less natural process than acquiring L1 only because we make it so. Many people acquire L2 without any classes. An hour per day of CI is an

From a recent Dilbert comic: Dilbert (to his boss with the two stacks of pointy black hair): “We added a new performance test, but learned that the test itself is flawed. Now our product fails our own tests and our customers are asking to see the test results. Do I have permission to fake the

Ruth’s rubric, designed to keep kids at their ease and not as a “gotcha” kind of thing to put in the grade book, reminds me of a post here from a few years ago by Sabrina, which, if anyone doubts the power of comprehensible input instruction, they should definitely watch: https://benslavic.com/blog/the-proof-is-in-the-pudding/

Ruth sent this for Kristen but I thought I would post it here for anyone interested.  relaxedunrehearsedlow-pressureinterviewrubric Ruth explains: Hi Ben, I don’t know if the attached document would be useful to Kristen who is looking for speech and writing rubrics. It’s just for listening comrehension and speaking. I made it up a while ago

When I ask a story now, as opposed to a few years ago, I always think of a story as a pathway to the reading. It’s like a twist on TPRS to see Step 3 as the source of the greatest grains, the goal of the work. The reading is the big deal. When the

This is just a short addition to a thread we had going here a week ago. Assessment of speaking output should never occur in a comprehensible input based class. Why do that? Force is the wrong word when it comes to speech output – it kicks in the affective filter to an alarming degree. Evaluating speech

Last month Martin quit because he was in pain. I love the honesty. For some reason we’re not allowed to speak plainly like that, even here. Everything is supposed to be wonderful. We are happy and our kids are learning. Bullshit. The chaos is real, the leadership is in shambles, and language teaching is in

I have reason to believe that a person recently completed a PhD thesis based almost completely on material from these pages without credit. I am sorry but I won’t go into it any more than that, although it makes for some juicy discussion. Just wanted to say it here. I don’t know what to do other

Another group member from Chicagoland sends a report and she has a question as well: Hello Ben, I am a Spanish teacher in a Chicago progressive private school, a Reggio Emilia inspired school. I teach PK-2nd. This is my first year there and the fifth of my teaching life. I am also an English learner.