James wrote a spot on description of what I think writing should be in our classrooms: …don’t we ultimately want our students not even to think about the words and grammar before they talk and write? Like while I am writing this sentence the words are just there and they just come out. There is […]
A few months ago in a comment I mentioned the following nineteen steps as a kind of sequencing guideline for getting through an auditory CI class, something a newer teacher could print out and refer to during class to keep things running along smoothly. This passage is actually a draft from a chapter I am
This is a repost, for people who have recently joined our group, of strategies that have formed the core of our discussion here over the past six years. This list is meant to refocus, restate, defend and illustrate what we know works in our comprehension based classes. Find information about these bad boys either in
Chris Stolz’ article on thematic units is brilliant and highly recommended to the group. The link should be sent over to the Language Educators group, really, even if that thread was snuffed out by the huffing and puffing wolves over there a few weeks ago. Here is my favorite quote from the article: …when was
Hi Ben, Hope Winter is treating you well out there in CO. Sorry for the length, but I wanted to share this with you: Today in a French 3 class I was sitting on top of my desk, typing at a computer stand, while my kids raised their hands to feed me the lines of
Over on the Forum a few days ago James asked Eric a question about use of L1 by the students in our CI classrooms: Eric, you said a while ago in a comment on the blog that in the natural method L1 is allowed for responses. That got me thinking. You rightly pointed out that
Last night Eric pointed out to me that in one month (November) on the ACTFL Language Educators list there were 171 comments on the five threads we started. The big one had 99 rancor-filled comments in posts about Thematic Units by Eric Herman and Alisa Shapiro-Rosenberg. The other four CI threads combined had 72 comments
Alisa Shapiro-Rosenberg (Winnetka) told me this today: My sister was at Target in LA yesterday and tripped on a basket and fell. A man behind her asked, “Are you okay, miss?” She got up and it was non other than ….Justin Bieber!! How embarrassing! TRUE STORY!! Here is a story we could do that is
Anne Matava would like to know if anyone has a good MovieTalk clip for the holidays to share.
We have some new video and thank you Sean. Sharing video of ourselves teaching and then talking about it here ranks pretty high as a CI training tool, because we don’t have to get on a plane to share and process stuff: Hi Ben – I finished uploading two 10 minute videos of me teaching a Spanish
What is the best CI training out there? I have heard votes for the Learning Lab model pioneered by Diana Noonan in DPS. I have heard good things about the War Rooms from last summer. And then there is a third model, the old one where a TPRS “expert” gets in front of a group
We have a new set of 20 videos of different DPS teachers from the 2013 iFLT conference in San Diego. Thank you Diana Noonan! Diana also tells me that we will be getting the 2014 Denver videos as well, in about a month. So these will fatten up our growing collection: https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B0OkPducv3osc0Y0R29PMjZtdXc&usp=sharing Keep in mind
