This is from Kathrin Shechtman in Germany: This summer I went to the Agen conference where Ben Slavic and Tina Hargaden unveiled their new initiative with stories created from images that the students create – the Invisibles. Before that I had almost completely moved away from stories and just gone to PQA with the kids, […]

In this post on his site Jim Tripp explains something he is working on when he writes story scripts: http://www.trippsscripts.com/single-post/2016/10/25/Somewhat-Simple

From David Maust of the famous Latin Kings: John Piazza is giving a workshop, accompanied by David Maust, at California High School in Whittier, CA this coming Saturday, Nov. 5, 2016. Although it deals directly with Latin, teachers of any language will have take-aways for this as John shows how to have students develop FVR

Administrators cannot be expected to know all best practices in language education, especially for a content area that is so drastically different from core subjects, so we have to educate them. In the following communication between Robert Harrell and a parent, we have a template from Robert that we all could modify to use to

Here are some possible zinger responses to the “What happens if they change schools and can’t conjugate verbs?” question that we often get from admins, parents and even kids. This might be good to tape to a desk and have ready to go when needed: 1. (Robert) “So, you’re asking me to do less than

Tina’s principal has questioned her “philosophy”. That was a mistake. CI is not a philosophy. It is a way of teaching based on research. In this post, Robert Harrell describes Teaching using Comprehensible Input (TCI), sometimes known as TPRS: TCI FAQs Here are some answers to frequently asked questions about TCI: Q. What do TCI,

I got a question that maybe somebody can answer: Hi Ben, I must be doing something wrong, and I’m hoping you can point me in the right direction. I’ve figured out (I think) that I need to register (separately from joining the PLC) to join the Forum, because I received an access denied message and

Cool things keep happening. Today we welcome a new PLC member from New Zealand! Here is a little about Eric Lindblom: Hi Ben – I teach Japanese to Years 7-13 (6th – 12th grade) at a very small rural secondary school about 2 hours south of Christchurch, New Zealand. I’m actually an American and began

If you ask a question on the Forum and it doesn’t get a good answer, just email it to me at benslavic@yahoo.com and I will post it as an article. As we cruise along now in our tenth year together, we must remember that one of the highest priorities on this website is to answer

Traditional teachers and the administrators who believe them about speech output also don’t get what we do also in terms of grammar instruction. They misconstrue output and grammar. We teach a ton of grammar, but within the happy contexts of listening and reading. Our grammar instruction is real because we provide our students within non-stop

We have a category on output here, as well as a primer or two. The basic concept is that we don’t force output, allowing it to emerge naturally. This is in opposition to most foreign language teachers, who, because they believe in forcing output, ruin kids’ confidence in themselves. Robert Harrell addressed the topic of

Tina called me from one of her classes today. Her kids were making posters (see links below). The feeling through the phone was happy kids. The theme Tina had assigned was “Babies Don’t Take Tests”. A kid in the class got on the phone and started lecturing me on the fact that babies don’t use