We in the PLC owe much to Catharina Greenberg. Her sharing of ideas here with us over the years has benefitted us in many ways. I am sure that I am not alone in saying that her voice is one of the most respected and listened to in our group and I know that she […]

Yasar added this comment about assessment to the previous article: Ben: The sample tests that we gave to our students after fifty hours of instruction are comprehension based. Little output is required. The achievement level after the test is 100%. That is, 100% of the students taking this test received a grade of 45 (the

Many of us had the honor of meeting some the members of the Turkish military language teachers in Denver and Chicago last summer. This report is from Yasar Karum: Hi Ben, So far we have given fifty hours of English instruction. We have done TPR and listening activities through textbooks (Before Book One, Listen First).

And here is another report from Yasar’s colleague Osman: Hi Ben, This is Osman from Turkey. Last July I attended the NTPRS conference in Lisle, IL. Everything about TPRS method was going okay until the first day I attended your unscheduled evening TPRS sessions with other TPRS experts. To me, those sessions were much more

John has a question for the group that some of us may be able to relate to: My question for the group is, what do you do when you are faced with an ugly class? I can’t think of any other word to describe this class, except ugly. It’s ugly in there almost every day.

I shared this article outlining a possible approach to presenting to school WL departments about six weeks ago here. Since then it occurred to me that if anyone is going to use any part of it they might also benefit from sending out my book Stepping Stones to Stories to the department you are working

Here is the link from jen that I kept in the queue over recent weeks, delayed because we were having our little “tea time” with the ACTFL group members. It fits very well with Laurie’s comment here last nite about how our intent to show kids that they matter should be our guiding principle as

We have discussed the very important issue of teaching small groups of kids in smaller classes or in home school settings using comprehensible input but we don’t have a category on it for ease of reference. Today I am adding two new categories to meet this need: one called Home School and another called Small

Let’s not mince words. Kids of today have few reasons to believe in themselves. The scene in most schools is still all about competition and testing and dominating and winning and excluding others. But if we learn to teach using comprehensible input we can change that culture of competition into one of cooperation and mutual

Here is an old blog post from 2008: There is a line in either Baudelaire or St.-Exupéry, I can’t remember which, in which the writer is talking about some guy who thought that he could get somewhere by “voie de terre”, by land, not realizing that his destination was an island. I’ll have to track that

If you need a little chuckle this morning here’s one. My favorite is the advertisement in the third paragraph. Unless, of course, you think that by filling out their survey something will happen. I don’t: Dear Colleague, ACTFL will soon be launching a sixteen month initiative, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to

A repost from last spring: We accept classroom stress as normal, in spite of the fact that we have now found a way to teach that is not inherently stressful. Yes, the great fact about comprehension based teaching is that its nature is to be almost devoid of stress. It is the atmosphere of striving