Our Steven Ordiano in CA joins a long list over the years of teachers here who over the years have had to respond to administrators who – despite good intentions – cannot seem to understand the actual nature of comprehensible input instruction. Steven is not the first nor will he be the last to be asked […]
Robert expresses something that has been about two years in the making. I feel it is true: …I think there is a trend forming. I, too, used to stress over “bell-to-bell instruction”, making every minute count, and getting “enough” CI in. Now that I understand the time frame of acquisition better, I understand that “losing”
Here is something that Linda and I do from time to time with our students: Please address the following prompts: 1. What do you most enjoy about our class? 2. What activity do you feel is the most useful in learning French/Mandarin? 3. What is something that you struggle with in class? 4. Do you feel that
This idea of getting departmental language classes together in the same room in a kind of town meeting format led to the blockbuster breakthrough strategy here on our blog of Two Strikes and You’re Out, which for me at last has snuffed out the blurting problem as if it never existed. Here’s the report on
This discussion about blurting is the most important discussion of all with no exceptions. Why do all this work to learn how to teach like this and then have some kid ruin it all by blurting? I am also going to work with Linda and Zach to bring all our students together to talk about
Such a big discussion we have been having this year so far on blurting! I would like to continue it with an untested suggestion. I have a tripod in my classroom with big paper on it: In addition to preventing my kids from saying one word of English during CI discussion, I am going to
Strategy #4 – Word Chunk Team Game (WCTG): It would be nice for teachers if communication via language could be done via single words only; their jobs would be much simpler. Unfortunately that is not the case. Languages require that words be grouped together in order for communication to occur. So we definitely want to
If you are struggling with getting high energy at the start of class, this is definitely something you should look into. I have settled on starting my classes with this and it definitely works because it gets the kids thinking in their bodies. I am suggesting it for Lance for his new Spanish gig. Strategy
Lance requests advice from the group: Back in April I applied to a school expanding their language courses to 7th grade, and they hadn’t settled on whether to teach Latin, French, or Spanish. They went with Spanish. It turns out that things haven’t been working out this year for them, and I have an interview
From Diane: Hi Ben, Got this from ACTFL’s Research Special Interest Group. Would you share the link and info with the PLC? ~ Diane Colleagues: Please help us get a good response for this research study on second language teaching techniques! Anyone who is currently teaching a second/foreign language (K-12 or college/adult) can participate. Thank you in advance for forwarding
Angie has a question: Hi Ben, I wrote this in an email to Eric but realized that I’d like to put this question before the group… I had a good time with the video (The trailer from Frozen) but but the activities really showed me that my classes have taken a wide split between students
This script was shared here in past years. It is from Jim’s script book Tripp’s Scripts, which many of us have and use a lot and which has a lot of holiday stories in it besides a lot of really good – and simple – other scripts: ____ years ago I want to be you should be this year Two
