As we begin to gear up for real for the coming school year, we must avoid confusion. Many of our threads become unavoidably obtuse, and I accept that, but in spite of all the complex discussions that we always seem to get going here, the overriding theme of simplicity must be our main goal for […]

I just added this to the five bail out moves described in my new book (the iFLT notes I wrote for San Diego actually became a book for beginners): Often, in the daily grind of teaching, we struggle. It’s just that way. The five bail out moves presented in this book are excellent ways to deal

I received an emailed course description from a member of the PLC to look over and it was too complex. Does anybody else do that – write mini novels about course expectations each fall? Maybe it’s because we got long descriptions of our courses from teachers in college. Many of us explain everything from how we weigh grades to

Today was a very happy day, as a group of PLC teachers in Chicago met with Sabrina. Here is the report from Sabrina: Today a few teachers from The Greater Chicago area and myself got together . It was great seeing each other in person for the first time after years or months of virtual

There is a reason we have long summer breaks in education, a real one that only teachers and students can know. We need them in order to survive. Since ours is emotionally a most demanding profession, we must rest for long periods of time. What we go through during the year in our buildings, in

Carol sent this. It makes Krashen’s case against early speech output that much more compelling by substantiating the fact that the mind is always busy processing what it hears and trying to turn it, over years, into speech output, and doing so via the unconscious mind. The key thoughts here is the “over years” part and the

I think we should celebrate our successes more here with each other, to balance the hard work we do in the trenches. Here is a celebration from Robert: Hi Ben, It is so encouraging to hear from students, and I thought this might also encourage some of the ones who are struggling. One of our English

Chris Stoltz reports in with this: Hey Ben: A friend, Mark, while in undergrad was part of an experiment at then University of Calgary. He was asked to listen to a CD of a computer-generated, monosyllabic language while sketching pictures that appeared on a computer screen. (Mark said it sounded like slow simple Chinese: monosyllabic, with

Those following the thread about Bob Patrick’s upcoming classes on CI at the University of Georgia may be interested to see the course description. I made a category for it so we can keep up with how that develops, since it is probably one of the first of its kind at the university level in the United

Michele gives us an update on Movie Talk. For the previous thread on this important topic for next year, click on the category. Here is the update: Hi Ben, I was stunned to find out that iJFLT published an article on Ashley Hastings’ MovieTalk technique in 2006: http://www.tprstories.com/ijflt/IJFLTFall06.pdf Of course, I wasn’t doing TPRS your

Many of us start the year with CWB and OWI and Word Associations and the Word Chunk team game (https://benslavic.com/workshop-handouts.pdf). We need to remember to throw the right amount of TPR into that mix. It’s a deal breaker for the success of our year, along with the Classroom Rules and of course jGR. In a recent comment

Our own Trisha Schutzius is opening up a language school in her home in Fort Collins. Anyone in that area might be interested. I think that what Trisha is doing, and the way she has set up her webpage in particular, is a model for some of us who might be thinking of doing this