My new mission statement about our work is: “Damn the research. Look at their faces. It will tell you everything that you ever needed to know about what they are learning. They learn because they want to. It has nothing to do with thinking.” Watch this video by our own Elissa (Express Fluency): In this […]

Melissa Sadler sent this video. Once you see it you’ll get how it explains her point below: …I just received this and thought this is sometimes how language teachers feel when they are forced to follow textbooks but know the power of CI. Plus it’s a cat video and it’s French…. http://blog.theanimalrescuesite.com/henri-halloween/#s5klPRH5BIIPqDxq.01 Melissa

Elissa is doing her first teacher training Nov 12-13. She shares: Hello PLC community! I am doing my first teacher training in a couple of weeks! I’m about to start planning this, but before re-creating the wheel I thought I’d check in with the collective wisdom of this group. I have one and a half

This is just an update on our very loose and ongoing thinking about forming a new group for comprehension based teaching the real way and not the ACTFL way. Those who remember the thread know that this was Alisa’s suggestion and it was made on the ACTFL list and not here. The reason I use

Keri Colwell started doing comprehension based teaching last spring and has made great strides. I had asked her to report in on how things were going and the following is a compilation of the emails I have received from her so far this year. As interesting as our discussion has been with ACTFL, and we

So far we have Anu in San Diego who is there teaching lots of languages including Tamil. And of course lots of Chinese teachers and Martha in Japan but I don’t think we have anyone teaching Indonesian. So now we do! Catherine Elliot shares her bio here. Anyone else who wants to send in a

Well, the summer was so busy that I have forgotten to publish a Teacher of the Month article since last May! Oh well. I do want to see keep these going so we’ll just pick it up again from here. Remember that it shouldn’t just be me that chooses the person, so if you have

This is from Diane Neubauer: Hi Ben – I lost the place on the PLC where you asked for a description of reports. I think they would be good for people learning CI, too. Feel free to use the idea and share. – Diane Reports to start the beginning of classes: I heard this idea

Last week I asked for those in the group who have presented recently on behalf of our work to send in details about when and where they presented. I asked for this information not just to acknowledge those in our group who have been willing to do that, which is no small thing, but also

What forms the spine of a story? Why, the three structures of course! They are isolated out and focused upon at the beginning of the class, in the establishing meaning phase, and they are practiced and repeated amidst a smattering of words in PQA, and then they reappear from time to time in the general word fabric

We focus on the structures in PQA. We say each one in every sentence and in each question we create. It is in the slamming repetition of those same three (or two) structures over and over and over that the kids actually acquire the langauge. We can’t just focus on any words and expect the PQA to be interesting.

Here is the text by Matthew that I mentioned in the last article that has brought closure to the food fight with ACTFL for me: Thank you for this post, Nathaniel. I don’t think ACTFL is the enemy some are making them out to be, and I don’t think they view TPRS as their enemy,