A repost from a few years ago: We just can’t afford to be bored in our life’s work. It’s terrible to go to a job every day that we don’t enjoy. We must find a way to make it fun. We just must. We don’t have a choice. For me, twenty years ago, it was

In this follow-up article to the important doc (previous article) by our group members Jesse and Ele, I make the case for ANYONE using the StarChart™ to use it (their document) in their communication with ANYONE who wants to know more about CI, and not get led down the garden path of the current misdirected

A repost: I got this copy of an article from a colleague, not a group member, who was lamenting the current state of well intentioned ignorance/denial some WL departments in the U.S. are still in about the current changes in best practices in WL instruction: Being Clear About What Foreign-Language Achievement Looks Like In this

There is a certain sadness in thinking about what’s going to happen in the fall, not just in language education but in all subjects. Teachers will again walk down to the faculty lounge and complain about their students, just as they do every year. But this time their complaints will all be centered around what

Some of the Reasons Why I Prefer Non-targeted Comprehensible Input NTCI) …it is very hard to create compelling messages when the hidden agenda is the relative clause….                                                                                     – Dr. Stephen Krashen Nobody at ACTFL has ever said anything about you having to communicate with your students while using certain words. Try doing that in

The George Floyd killing will reverberate through every facet of American life, and from there, to the world. An entire system of oppression is being exposed. It will reach everywhere and the change will be unlike any seen in the history of the world. This is my belief.  That is why Trump had to get

We take the data-collection piece of our work as a true and valid thing. It is not. We are serving a monster – the data collection business that makes millions of dollars off of us and our kids each year. It is sucking our souls, vampire-like, and we are letting it. COVID is here as

This is a repost from a few years ago: Most of us are fundamentally frightened of this entire process called comprehensible input. It is just too foreign to our natures as teachers trained in the old way. We have been trained in ways that contradict the new ideas that will shape foreign language education in this

Wilhelm Reich talked about the idea of muscular armour – the expression of the personality in the way the body moves. He was controversial, of course, but his base idea that a lot of the human experience is connected to how people defend themselves in social settings (classrooms, for example) has in my view not

Another repost from 2014: This discussion about targeting certain expressions so that our students can do certain things (order a meal, etc.) in the TL raises questions about the nature of language. What is the nature of language and what is it’s purpose? Most would answer that the nature of language is to allow people

This post is from our PLC member Laura Avila in Maine: Next week we are getting another layer of police inspection into our teaching under the title of “Learning Walks”. They want to see us using Learning Targets in the form of “I can” statements. I have adapted the ACTFL “I can” statements to make