Robert continues with his questions for textbook companies. It would be nice if they would answer. But they won’t. Their involvement in education is not spurred by the same interests that prompt these questions from Robert: How does the textbook take the universally recognized Silent Period into account? How does the textbook support the ACTFL […]

Robert continues to adress Sarah’s original questions with some questions of his own: How do the textbook’s scope and sequence align with the Natural Order of Acquisition? Since language acquisition researchers (e.g. Noam Chomsky, Daniel Pink, Alice Omaggio Hadley, James Asher, Stephen Krashen, Bill Van Patten, Wynne Wong), while disagreeing on many things, all agree

The Zoom training on Book 1 of the Ultimate CI series begins this coming Monday, for those interested. Go to benslavic.com and click on “training courses”. If you want to really access what is in these new books, the Zoom training is important. If money is a concern due to the pandemic hitting everybody hard,

In this third article in this series, Robert begins a series of responses to Sarah’s questions. Sarah had said: …the Department Chair has told us we are going to use Realidades. I used that book 5 years ago when I first started teaching and it hasn’t changed a bit. When I asked the sales rep

One of the most severe things we can do to ourselves as teachers is to collect so much information, so many different strategies and activities, that we can’t manage all of it. This is actually a form of self-harm. When we lack a simple formula in a simple and doable WL curriculum, when we end

A teacher wrote to me in an email this week: Q. Ben I am thinking of joining your PLC, but what would you say is the real goal of it so I can make my decision and see if I want to join? A. What a great question! If we all step back from the

Next Wednesday night (Dec. 19th) I am doing a webinar for Teacher’s Discovery on why reading is so important in a CI language program. All are welcome. It will be a 45-minute session on their website beginning at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time. I’ll put the link up when I get it from Teacher’s Discovery.

Robert starts out by presenting some questions he had read on the moretprs listserve: On the moretprs Yahoo group, one of the members made inquiry about dealing with a textbook adoption and questions for textbook company representatives. I replied with some questions of my own. Below are the original query (used by permission) and my

It’s odd that the big textbook companies have held dominion over our profession for so long. It’s even more odd how the annual ACTFL conference, in spite of their statements about proficiency and use of the language in the classroom, has become merely an outlet, a big book sale, for corporate book and other (proven

In many ways the new AP exam is better than the old one. There is no cloze exercise, and there are no discrete-item grammar questions. Grading is done holistically. However, scoring is still based primarily on output, and no matter what anyone says, a typical high school program will not get students to the level

For those doing the Star, I am beginning the Zoom trainings on how to use it over winter break. The information is on my website.