Mary Beth asked in a comment here last week about a possible actual first class scenario. The following series of posts provide one possibility. There are a lot of background posts before we even get to the description of what a first class should look like, but I don’t want to leave anything out and […]

Well, Landen and I got here to New Delhi all right after a relatively calm but exhausting journey through with a week long stopover in Paris. Although we didn’t stop in Iceland, I wish now that we had. Who would not want to visit a country where social justice seems to be a way of

I was working with a Chinese teacher on the last day of the conference a few days ago, and she chose to work with: looks for finds These two words are powerful together! I highly recommend them to anyone wanting some guaranteed success in their first week of school next month. By the way, I

I wanted to report that Dr. Krashen in MN was very enthusiastic about a conference in New Delhi, in the next year and a half of so. Everyone is invited. We are still in the planning stages. What I want is to work only in coaching now that I have my new kick ass coaching

Here is a valuable set of well-matched verbs if you want to start out the year with a super mini story. I know that they are well matched because we used these verbs in coaching at iFLT last week in MN and they worked for new people. They are from Linda Li: (This is more

I heard lots of comments about how Eric was missed at iFLT. Oh well, he does send this from Honduras: Hey Ben – This sums up the “facts” of SLA in a nutshell: https://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/421 “Second language acquisition (SLA) research: its significance for learning and teaching issues” by Florence Myles. If every FL/ESL teacher only had

Stephen Krashen has said many times that he only did the research and that it is up to classroom teachers like us, everyday people, to implement it. This is a profound thought. It means that we can’t turn to anyone as an expert. There are no experts. There is just us in our classrooms sloughing

Anne Mackelvie in Australia has some good questions for the group: Hi Ben, Am currently reading and taking notes on your book “The Big CI Book”. It is going to be my bible! I also learn a lot by following Ibu Cathy’s blog, as I am in Australia teaching Indonesian too, to Years Prep –

Carol Hill says: All of the jargon aside, when I read this it’s very easy for me to say that I do all of this in the TPRS/CI way. I think that another more traditional teacher could find lots of ways to support the use of more ACTFL ish PBLs, IPAs , and thematic units.

I’ve been going through some old comments looking for that one that has the list of all the things a teacher does in the course of one day (it’s a ridiculous amount of stuff but I can’t find the comment), but I did find this from Nathaniel which I turned into an article at the

I can’t believe we have a “Chairs” category. But as some of us, increasingly more of us, dump the desks we probably need one. I was going over some old comments and found this from Robert. Good, practical information for those of us who are considering moving from the primitive (that really is the word)

Ruth was talking about teaching sixth graders and Don posted this comment which I missed until tonite. I was probably out riding my bike. I’m just publishing Don’s advice to Ruth here as an article because I can see the ideas include a lot of movement, and we can have the best CI strategies in