From Eric Herman: You’ve heard how some teachers do “reports of the day” typically as a way to work in that boring, topic-based vocabulary mandated by a backwards department. So, they may frequently start class answering “What is the weather?” The vocabulary gets acquired over the year. Well, I don’t have any particular curriculum to […]

Maybe someone has an idea that can help a kid in Houston: Ben – Do you know of anyone who is doing a TPRS high school class virtually or long-distance? My 15-year-old nephew In Houston finally just got tested for a learning disability and he is in the 5th percentile for memorization. The tester said,

Laurie Clarcq – Feb 15, 2014 One thing that really helps me is to let go of the firm idea of three “locations” and think of stories in terms of “situations” instead. That will open up a world of possibilities that you might not have thought of before. Using an oldie but goodie for TPRS

Blaine Ray – April 28, 2012 I think you keep giving your students repetitions until they know it. They know it when they can answer with confidence, accuracy and without hesitation. My bias is that they know the most common verbs of the language. My experience is that it takes many many more repetitions than

We ask our students to do free writes every week or two. The idea of course is to give students limited practice in writing, but we can also use the free writes to mark gains. A student in a level 1 class who can write just a few single words in the first few weeks

This is from Jody. It’s long, but watch it anyway. Just go get a cup of coffee and watch it:

Eric went through and found some really valuable quotes from four TPRS masters. Here is the first one: Susie Gross – Jan 26, 2014 No there is NO requirement for a story to have three locations. I started doing TPRS workshops in the 1990’s. In those days, beginning teachers said that they could not speak

I got this important question. Who can respond? Dear Mr. Ben Slavic, Can you help me? I need to learn Spanish in a right brain TPRS approach. So I can better work and serve among the poor and also within the spiritual work I do. Do you know of anywhere in California where I can

John Piazza brings up a whole can of worms question: I have recently received some criticism for, and heard from others who have stopped using, the true/false quick quizzes. The argument against them is that because students can guess, they are not accurate indicators of student knowledge/acquisition/progress. Over the past 3 years of using them,

This suggested class sequence provides more detail than Suggested Class Sequence A: We have outlined a three step core process/drive train for any comprehensible input activity, and we have described how that process can take the form of seven steps. Like an accordion, it can also be expanded out to nineteen steps. We offer these

At conferences people talk about how certain expressions are late acquired, like the difference between ser and estar, and so should be avoided early on. Over on the Forum a few months ago Catharina has written that “mistakes” in output come from “not having had enough input, not from structures being late acquired. The lack

Robert adds his proposal for ACTFL San Diego: Hi Ben, Here is a copy of my proposal for ACTFL in San Diego. It’s a bit different from the idea of presenting beginning TPRS, but it’s something that I am comfortable presenting alone. Robert ACTFL2015Proposal