Why do students choose to not continue on in our four year programs? After all, a four year program of language instruction should not be a one or two year program. It should be a four year program.  Students, if our instruction was interesting, would not drop out of our programs after completing only one […]

I write stuff on scraps of paper and they collect on my desk next to my computer and then I throw them away. Before I toss them this time, here they are written out: …when traditional teachers are faced with real facts based on real research, many of them go into intellectual convulsions and then

There is another point to add here, not touched on in the first Broken Record Technique article but critical to the discussion. The teacher in her initial email to me said this: …their child is one of those children who is very bright but obstinate and tries to get away with doing the least amount

Example 4: Our final example is from master teacher Robert Harrell to a teacher who was in conflict with her admin team over the concept of rigor in her classroom: I’m sorry to hear you are getting grief from your administrator about rigor. It sounds to me like he attended a meeting and received a

It is generally accepted in educational research that people are either visual, auditory or tactile/kinesthetic learners. Some students exhibit balanced combinations of two or even all three of the learning styles; others are heavily “weighted” to one style. Schools often ask teachers to differentiate between these learning styles when teaching and assessing in their classes.

Listening is the Bedrock My heart goes out to the students whose learning style is predominantly visual but who are in a CI classroom. Why? It is because languages are learned via listening, and so the visual students are at a disadvantage. The skills other than listening – reading, writing, and speaking – all emerge

Which would you rather have: (a) high test scores from a few of your students, or (b) happiness and confidence in all of your students? You can’t have both, obviously, the way the system is designed. It seems like a no-brainer, right? Then why do we continue to go for (a) at the expense of

I can report that FVR as a TPRS reading activity started to stretch out and lose its shape and value to students in the early 2000s when “Read and Discuss” became the norm in TPRS classes, immediately and very early on in the anti-textbook movement. It was then that language students – because of their

Of course, students whose learning style is predominantly visual, when given worksheets in a language class, prefer them. But auditory and tactile kids, when given the same worksheets, feel defeated. Visual language students in a traditional language classroom don’t have to change – the worksheets save them. (This probably accounts for a part of the

After your students take the inventory, the main point to stress with them is that even if their visual or tactile learning style conflicts with your auditory teaching style, they can adapt. Make it into a fun game and make them understand fully that you are going to do all you can to make yourself

Training Them Discuss the 3 learning styles with your students before they actually fill out the inventory. Make sure that the kids understand these points: 1. One out of every three people in any population is either visual, auditory or tactile. 2. Visual learners prefer to process information logically by reading and writing. They prefer