Robert Harrell:  Kathrin, your comments above, as well as similar comments from colleagues throughout the world, indicate just how far from reality some people can be. Your supposed “helper” reveals how little she understands students, psychology, learning, group dynamics, and a myriad of other facets that are essential parts of “The Invisible Classroom”. (Check out […]

Hi Ben, Below is a report as to how one of my French 2 classes is going.  It was the disengaged class who is now wanting grammar. Today, at my school, students were asking for grammar.  Though they are few, they are very vocal.  Someone complained, “I do not how to say “how are you”. 

Claire Ensor has written: TPRS is mostly plagued with a feeling of accountability for individual words.  TPRS has innocuous ways of holding children accountable for targets or words via easy questions, gestures, TPR, and choral translating. But going painfully slow is the most subtle.  Going too slow sets up the expectation that children will understand each

Never one to obfuscate or confuse, our Steve Ordiano said something in a comment here this morning that bears repeating. It is an idea that is refreshing and quite new in the CI community, which in spite of all the rhetoric is still very tied to curricular objectives and lists of words and, dare I

Last year from time to time our elementary French teacher would bring her 5th graders in to visit my middle school classes. Whenever the kids came, they would share something that they had been working on. But I could always tell that the stuff they said was rehearsed. They weren’t actually saying it, they had memorized it,

Someone on FB named Thomas attacked my one pointed focus on Krashen and CI, arguing, like so many other foreign language teachers, for a more eclectic approach. This is my unapologetic response to him: Thomas you miss the point. I have been teaching for 38 years and my conclusion is that Dr. Krashen has it

Stephen Krashen – April 26, 2012 How’s this: Don’t worry about number of repetitions. Don’t worry about vocabulary. Worry only about presenting comprehensible and compelling input, vocabulary will take care of itself. For crucial vocabulary, there will be plenty of repetitions, and they will be “distributed,” not “massed,” exactly the optimal way of presenting items

A question for French teachers: Hello Ben, We have started using the TPRS method this year at school. I am using it for French 1, 2 and 3. I find that I need to find someone in the same situation as I am in, using TPRS plus Bien Dit. Our school wants to keep the

We can see descriptions of Robert Harrell’s readers at: http://compellinginput.net/ Currently the only thing he has in French and Spanish is “Pirate de la Mer du Nord“. He has more German materials. We can read chapter 1 of North Sea Pirate by clicking on “Samples“ and following the link there.

Jeanette has been in the group for many years now and has a combination report from the field as well as a question: Hi Ben, I am still learning. Everyday. With the littles now 🙂 I’m back with the littles after 12 years with middle school. Another adventure. Happily I am doing this part time

Robert uses a sharp knife to cut through a lot of confusion in this post: I was at a conference last weekend (6-9 October 2016), but it wasn’t a language teachers conference; it was a business conference. During the course of the weekend we had several times that we were asked to interact with other

A repost from 2012: There is a grammar ghost in me and it won’t die. I guess ghosts can’t just die – they have to be released. So I guess I have to release my grammar ghost from flying around inside my head or I won’t be able to be happy in my teaching. This