Yvonne asks: My name is Yvonne and I live in London, UK with my husband and 3 children. I have a background in Digital media and eLearning (BSC & Masters degree) I taught Business Information Technology and Social media marketing for 6 years in a London University. I am currently on a one year break […]

This is to formally announce the publication of my newest book: The Big CI Book – A Step by Step Survival Guide for Foreign Language Teachers. At 400 pages, it vastly expands on the skills and strategies we currently have available to us in TPRS/CI instruction. Those reading closely here over the past eight years,

I’ll put this and the article on the new book up here as sticky articles for those not reading every day over the summer and take it down later. I appreciate all the nice comments. Those who read here all the time know what writing that book entailed – going into every single post here

Dude every time I go to the list, once a year maybe, I regret it. I thought my message to Curtain was a good conversation starter and it ended up as usual ruffling feathers. The worst part is I don’t understand why. It seems as if there is a hierarchy of voices there and they

A nice check-in report from Emeka: Dear Ben, I am finally taking a moment to reflect on this last year of really delving into teaching with CI and want to thank you, Ben and the online community. I’ve spent countless hours reading and trying to learn and I know I still need a lot of

(Note: this post, though interesting to its writer, is probably too long to actually read.) Yesterday in a comment here Diane Neubauer said this: …It seems to me that among the TPRS and CI teaching community, there are people with various roles. Some are more like CI activists and mentors/trainers. Ex, I think Ben, especially

It has been a few decades that we have been doing NTPRS. iFLT is five years old this summer, maybe six. Agen is in its third year. And Maine has been putting on a great conference now for ten years! We’re not going away, folks! Skip asked me to make sure that those considering Maine

We translate almost nothing. If we have to translate words after the first part of class after we have established meaning, then we have made an error, we have gone out of bounds. That is the purpose of PQA, to make sure that the students are solid on the structures during the story to follow.

Chill shares. I read the last paragraph twice: Some teachers among our colleagues are only able to work with the top students. In a traditional FL program, that’s usually what’s left – the ones who like/get the grammar. Isn’t it easy to teach smart kids? Goodness, the smart ones can almost teach themselves! Isn’t our

Is Robert’s report a sign of the times? – Hey Ben: The French program at my school died this year. The teacher has been struggling with it for a couple of years and sees a significant loss of students between second and third year. (She is not a TCI/TPRS teacher.) Unlike Spanish, she does not

Steve addresses two jobs, one new (the second one below called the L1 Translator) that I will immediately add to the jobs category. This new job that Steve suggests is not one of those minor funny jobs, but rather a very practical and important one that I suggest we all test in the fall. Thank

I need to take a break for real this time. I tried in early June but the momentum from the great work/innovation being done in our classrooms from last year’s discussion and our own inner work has carried us on. But my mental fatigue now is considerable so I personally am going for some down