I now have a strong desire to share what I have learned about TPRS with as many people as I can back home, in earnest and with intensity (intentionally). Since I will have the time to go around and do that next year, I look forward to visiting as many schools back home as I can with my […]

I just resigned, had the resignation meeting, etc. this morning and it was most difficult but I got through it. As I sat there talking to Paul Chmelik and Beth Coyle, the school director and principal of the middle school respectively, it occurred to me that this place, the American Embassy School in New Delhi,

This is from jen. It has value to us on two levels: (1) it teaches us how to stop fake listening to our kids, and (2) if we continue to fail to hear what our students are really communicating to us in class, on many levels even if they don’t know the language, then we can use

I take seriously what Chris Stoltz and Eric Herman have taught me in recent month about how Step 1 of TPRS never was part of Blaine’s original design/process and happened more as a result of Susie Gross’ groundbreaking work in clarifying the method, when Step 1 kind of “happened”. So now TPRS consists of two steps

Here are some exerts from a recent comment here by Paul Kirschling of Denver Public Schools, for your edification and enjoyment: …this job is too difficult to do and still wind up feeling like a fake…. …one might as well get into sales and actually make some money…. …I will not judge but do wonder

I got this in an email from a group member today: …love the kids but harder to steer the CI ship with older kids traditionally trained under a different teacher each year of Spanish…. I think that this statement is very true. We talk about this from time to time here in our discussions, but over

Eric Herman has said: …it’s better to decide on your [CI] approach and then choose your own “way” – your own method – of making it happen in your classroom…. If we can’t get people to understand this, then this approach to teaching language is doomed. It will turn it into a method. It’s already

PLEASE understand that in my recent post I wasn’t calling for the abolishment of establishing meaning, gestures or PQA. Indeed, I wrote two books about those things. I was calling for getting rid of those things as they exist in the form of Step 1 of TPRS. (Eric Herman explains it below.) Of course, we

I’m breaking my contract here in New Delhi to return to the U.S. next year. It’s a long story (I don’t generally break contracts) that has to do with the pollution here and being a dad, which outweigh the great benefits of being in one of the elite schools in the world with an elite teacher in

If we compare storytelling and the way we acquire languages to a blade of grass, we can say that the root system is the input and the blade of grass itself is the output. The input must precede the output and act as the foundation and base for any output that follows. The blade (speech

Joe asked a question in 2013 that fits in with our current discussion on Scope and Sequence. It started a discussion that may still concern some of us so I repost it here. Hopefully we address it in more detail than we have in the past (we have been too general on this topic): This year

Language is processed unconsciously. As we hear words thousands of times their meanings move richly and deeply into the deeper mind and a wonderful dance of language creation occurs. The creation of a new language system can only occur in the unconscious mind. Children learn a language because they wants to know what it means – it