Many of us enjoyed Jim Tripp’s Halloween script. Here is one he has for after Thanksgiving: Nappy Nap pounds (lbs) after eating takes a nap Jeremy eats 999.9 pounds of mashed potatoes. After eating them, Jeremy takes a nap. He takes a nap on top of the table. After taking a nap, Jeremy wants more […]

I’ve taken some time to reflect on the direction of our discussions here over the past year and have concluded that our scope is drifting too wide. My first thought in creating this blog was to have a place where we could all discuss specific strategies to get better at comprehensible input. That remains my

This is from Mary Beth. I found the first eight minutes not very useful to his argument but if you start around the 8′ point you can get his point that he is for comprehensible input: Hey Ben – I can’t remember, but I think you posted this TEDx video a year or two ago

Grant sent this: http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/trying-harder-makes-it-more-difficult-to-learn-some-aspects-of-language-0721 “The results indicate that learning to identify relatively simple parts of language, such as words, is facilitated by effortful learning, whereas learning more complex aspects of language, such as grammatical features, is impeded by effortful learning.” “The findings support a theory of language acquisition that suggests that some parts of language

Krashen’s natural order hypothesis is a fairly important idea for any language educator to consider when deciding how to teach. The natural order hypothesis states that language is acquired in a particular order, and that this order does not change between learners, and is not affected by explicit instruction. Mary Beth sent me an interesting

Andrew Snider shares very important news: I’ve always been more of a lurker than I should be, but I won’t be very active commenting on the PLC for the next few months. I just became a dad for the first time. Mateo John Snider was born on Nov. 21 at 9:52 am. I’m super proud

Robert Harrell shares an article with us: Hi Ben, There is an article in the Washington Post about Christopher Paolini, the author of „Eragon“ and „The Inheritance Cycle“. It focuses on how he was educated (home schooled) and able to write a novel (later a cycle) and still get an education. However, there is a

James sent this about TPRS and Rigor. To me, it is a big red flag, a big one: Ben, not sure if you saw this on flTeach. It’s part of somebody’s response to someone asking, “How to increase rigor?” Notice just how badly TPRS is really understood by some people: …as far as increasing the

I remember when Mr. Chadwick, my French teacher at Culver Military Academy, told me that in the past tense the past participle agreed with any preceding direct object pronoun. I remember the ferocity with which I set out to memorize that rule. It didn’t help that the terms were foreign to me, but I reasoned

This is from James: Ben, I just posted this on my blog here: http://jameshosler.blogspot.com/2014/11/pictures-for-ci-whats-wrong-and-whats.html Here is what I wrote. Feel free to put it on your blog so it can get more exposure and more comments: Pictures for CI: What’s Wrong? and What’s Different? Ben Slavic (benslavic.com/blog) describes a procedure called Look and Discuss (L

Just arrived from San Antonio at the beach in Wilmington, NC where my family and I will spend Thanksgiving week. I want to say a few things about ACTFL. Getting myself to large conferences is always something I struggle with. I find the crowd, the travel and the non-stop meetings exhausting. That was all true

Michael Nagelkerke shares this clip from SNL: Hey Ben, I had seen this skit before long time ago, but I watched it again and now that I know better, I couldn’t help but think that SNL is making a social commentary about how foreign language is being taught in this country. The verb conjugation part