I am meeting more and more teachers online who have thought themselves not very good at language teaching when the real culprit for this lack of confidence can be found in the following article. It’s such a sad thing to see gifted teachers lose their confidence because of the approach used in their buildings and […]
More Robert Harrell. Ain’t it great? Far too many people hear “use authentic texts” and think “use ONLY authentic texts”. While I cannot speak for ACTFL, I imagine that they are not saying authentic texts only. I do know that the presenter from College Board who led the AP workshop I attended in 2011 did
Marko Sanden wrote this as a comment here on the PLC last week. It contains good insights into the details of online language instruction: “I remind them regularly that my assumption is that they WILL demonstrate interpersonal communication skills and that I’ve already given them those points each class and only they can lose them. For
What if your students don’t want to give any real energy to the interactive activities that we have worked so hard to learn as we have retooled our classrooms over to comprehensible input? What if the kids just act totally disinterested? What do we do then? Bryan offers perhaps the best response I have seen
If you have a copy of this book, please send me the PDF at benslavic@yahoo.com. I can’t find it in my computer. Merci d’avance! (I’ll send you other free books in return.)
A repost: Eric says: If you haven’t seen this talk, then check it out. It’s much of what Krashen and Ravitch have been saying forever! While not being about the FL classroom, I feel it sums up a lot of what we have also been saying on your blog about the US education system. http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/Toxic-Culture-of-Education-Joshu;search%3Ajoshua%20katz
Robert has offered some sterling advice on how to deal with administrators: 1. Have a checklist hanging by the door telling all visitors how exactly to observe your comprehensible input classroom. Ask the evaluator(s) to take one the moment they walk into the room. It guides their observation – unless they have a state-mandated checklist
My new website – much changed – will be live soon. I keep saying soon, but there is so much involved in web development, as many of us who have written books for our colleagues know. I do like this new image that my web developer just made:
For Sean and others doing it, here is the updated Star Sequence curriculum. Note that in Phases 1 and 2 everything is auditory which sets up a nice visual (reading) experience for our students in Phases 3, 4 and 5. Also notice, Sean, that the number of reading options have been reduced to only nine
In this communication between Robert Harrell and a parent, we almost have a template from Robert that we could modify to use to answer parent inquiries like the one he recently received below: Good afternoon Mr. Harrell, My wife and I have been after our son for the last few days and his grades and participation at
From our unmatched superstar Alisa, good stuff on online reading: “Regarding round-robin (one at a time) style reading – here’s a suggestion – dunno what the button names in Hangouts are but it works over Zoom. You screenshare the reading, then you ask for volunteers to raise their ‘little blue hand’ to read. The teacher
More from Robert Harrell: If you follow the history of the teaching of languages, a number of practices become logical – even if misguided. Up until the early modern period, Latin and Greek were taught as means of communication. When those languages were superseded by French (and later English) as the medium of international communication,
