Keri brought our attention back to a thread on Circling from last year in which Laurie Clarcq gave us a tour de force talk on Circling. She called it a practice and I am sure some of us will relate to that term in the sense that in this work there is no end goal […]

Robert’s email discussing Scope and Sequence with his district World Languages representative continues: 2. Furthermore, late-acquired items seem to simply require more exposure than early-acquired items. A corollary, therefore, is that delaying exposure to any feature of the language simply delays acquisition of that feature. For example, not exposing students to past tense or direct

Hi Ben – Things are going very well. I just gave mid-terms to one class of Spanish III. This was the first real “test” they’ve had all year and 21 out of 24 students got an “A” and the other three got “B”. Two of them actually told me that my class was the one

Nathaniel Hardt adds to the Scope and Sequence Discussion: Relevant to this issue of scope/sequence, the following is part of my Mid Year Exam Evaluation /Reflection comments which I submitted for Spanish 1. A, B, and C are the questions to be addressed and the numbers represent the paragraphs of my responses. I included more

[ed. note; this is the first of a reprinting of 23 articles written by Robert Harrell in 2013. We revisit them now in an attempt to further illustrate and defend what we do to anyone interested. We want to show how what we do aligns with standards and how it is much more student friendly

Bu Kathy, teaching Indonesian in Australia, has shared an update. Catharina in NJ and Kathy are doing 1:1 coaching sessions via Skype. So that she could share it with other Indonesian teachers, she blogged about it this morning. Here is the link: https://bucathydotcom.wordpress.com

In 2013 just at the start of that academic year Trisha Schutzius sent in a condensed version – for parents and administrators – of Robert’s Scope and Sequence piece originally published in August of 2013. This summary is for lazy readers. For those who, like me, are willing to pour over every word in all

The challenges for us to articulate what we do have not gone away and in the last year we have added many docs to the Primers, etc. They are all great but, as unavoidably happens on this site, like me, they are all over the place. I see Catharina’s elementary course descriptions as one pillar

The following request from Melissa is from a year ago. She was being challenged by a traditional teacher whose idea of a scope and sequence document is from the last century. Being new to this work, she reached out to the group for possible ideas and got some excellent documents, all sent or referenced by

PLC member Mochan asked in the Forum about course descriptions. Mochan has realized that, along with other transitions to teaching with CI, course descriptions can be adapted to reflect the process and goals of our fluency classes. Besides meeting an administrative requirement, well-written course descriptions can be used during the school year to help inform

Once Catharina was asked to write a few paragraphs describing what she does in each class. She was asked specifically not to mention TPRS as such. Here is what she wrote: FRENCH In Lower School French class we mimic as closely as possible the process by which children acquire their first language. The children are

Laurie reports: Hi Ben! I don’t know how many people saw this, but it could be very interesting! Bill Van Patten, in conjunction with Santanilla Publishing is offering a one hour webinar entitled “Against “Rules”” Here is the description: The acquisition of a second language is often described as the learning of rules. But what