I’m going out of Delhi for the next five days sans computer so I will check back in with you guys next week.

Carrie Anderson has a really good question: Hello Ben, I am still getting up the nerve to implement CI instruction in my middle school Spanish classes in Montana. This is my first year at new school, 4th year teaching. I really want to switch to CI but I am nervous for two reasons: one, is

John Piazza’s comment this morning needs multiple and frequent responses. Yes, we share video, primers, comments, strategies, but we seem to drop the ball when it comes to sharing those annoying documents about how we plan and our objectives and all that junk that administrators want. To stop that error of omission, I suggest that

In a comment today, talking to Laurie, John Piazza said this: Thank you for bringing up the new reality that many of us are facing, namely evidence of backwards planning, daily posted SWBAT (Students Will Be Able To) and specific agenda. In short, marching along to a specific scope and sequence, and nothing spontaneous. But

This comment from Diane got caught up in the flow of discussion last week but needs to be made into an article so we can get more clear on the term MovieTalk: Hi Ben, After my comments & others’ related to using video clips, and whether or not that’s MovieTalk or what, I contacted Dr. Hastings.

Jim had trouble posting this comment, as sometimes happens, so I’m just making into a post so we can read it: I used to have trouble doing the PQA to story transition. It did feel too scripted for me. I don’t really try anymore. If I’m doing a story I jump in as per what

Tennis requires two people. It’s boring with just one person hitting to the other side of the net with no one there. Teaching a language is like that, because human communication is reciprocal and participatory and back and forth and very Vygotsky. So we kind of need to get something back from our students when

So within the vast Realm of PQA we have all sorts of things we can do. (I just don’t think we should use PQA to set up a story.) We can put up an image and then talk about it, and relating it to (comparing and contrasting) our students’ lives. We call that Look and Discuss.

Of course, when we talk about dumping PQA and making it an option, we are not talking at all about preparing for reading novels – just preparing for stories. We don’t do PQA to prepare novels. When we prepare novels, we first do some stories in order to familiarize (not necessarily teach for acquisition) our students

For too long people have been confused, wrangled, stymied and frustrated by PQA. It’s time to make it optional. We need to hear from more people in the PLC before making a group decision. But yeah it may be time to lose it. It’s artificial and drives teachers nuts. Why not just start class with a story?

Here is the comment made by Eric that started the discussion about making PQA optional: …PQA in classic TPRS is targeted. Not sheltered. It may be the one step in TPRS that is most explicitly trying to teach something. I think it makes communication challenging and fake. Contextualizing targets is different from communication. How often

I am a big fan of Joe Dziedzic, as are many of us. He is teaching up in Aspen now. Here is a new video that he just uploaded to Vimeo. As I understand it, he is going to start uploading new ones about every other week. I will ask him to send them all to us