Here is a good question: How do you keep the rest of the class engaged while focusing on one student for the whole period?

An exchange in the comment fields between Jim and Ruth yesterday was very rich. In it, they addressed the need to let things develop within the narration of the story. How to do that? They also address the idea of possibly using images to stabilize the story creation process. Ruth addressed the need to correctly manage actors

I love the teaching in this video clip. It’s Adriana Ramirez (Vancouver) working from her new book Learning Spanish with Comprehensible Input Through Storytelling. Related: http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Spanish-Comprehensible-Storytelling-Students/dp/1770844120

I am two weeks into my new job in Portland (OR) Public Schools and I have never, ever been a happier teacher. I am teaching three classes of seventh-grade Spanish (first time in Spanish for them, and it is such a treat to teach the “uncut block”), one class of first-year, seventh-grade French, and one

I am currently starting the year with the Persona Especial questions.  Last week, each class, I talked to only one student per period per day.  I saw some issues that I bring to your attention and ask for help: 1. In Spanish I asked a kid, “When do you play basketball?.”   That kid launched

I struggle with staying in bounds. As you reference in your books, at the end of a lesson there are far too many other words on the board. How do you get suggestions from students to build details without having that happen? 

Question from Australia: Hi Ben – I  will be doing some work with Ian Perry here in Brisbane to further develop my TPRS skills. Is there a school teaching Japanese which uses TPRS? Our school also teaches Japanese and the Japanese teacher is coming to do some PD work with me. I just thought I

A repost from 2011: This is just a standard rant. I’m due for one and here it is: We are already there. What we did, how we did our jobs today, and how it adds to our stature is not what determines whether we will be successful or not as teachers. We are successful because we

We do hundreds of awesome new things every day in our classrooms but they are never recorded and never will be. That is the real work that CI offers. It just happens that in this work we are not overly caught up in our minds; we aren’t always trying to “do it right”. Happy communication

A parent told Eric Herman that language learning is linear. Eric wisely left it alone, because he could have kept that person busy listening to him for about 500 hours in a row with his unique knowledge of the research. But now I can’t get that comment out of my mind because it says so

Advantages of Dialogic Reading It is easy to implement and requires few materials (time, desire, text) and little training. It transcends learning disabilities, socio-economic status, and family structures. It is flexible (any text can be used) and easily differentiated according to the child’s interests and abilities and the books available. It is easily adaptable to

From Robert Harrell: Hey Ben: Recently I came across a term that was new to me, Dialogic Reading, so I did a bit of research on it and have typed up a summary of what I discovered. As you can see, it is very similar to things that we have developed for foreign language learners.