Nate Hill has a new site that could be of interest to our group. Here he describes it: As language teachers — especially as TPRS teachers — you know the importance of personalized CI for language learners. Wouldn’t it be great if language learners could build a network of speakers in the target language who […]

This is a brain break strategy, and a good one. The high level of rigor in comprehension based instruction requires brain breaks: The students form a circle around the perimeter of the room. A soft squishy ball, or just a tennis ball but nothing harder, gets tossed around the group from one kid to another. The

For those new to this group, this from TPRS in a Year! explains what circling is: Skill #5: Circling In the same almost magical way that pausing and pointing properly creates more engaged students, the students become strongly engaged when you circle properly. There is always a strong link between student engagement and good circling.

There is a rhythm to circling. It should not be a totally conscious, mechanical process, but rather one based on rhythm. Over years, it kind of moves down into our bodies and, whether we circle a targe structure a lot or just for a few seconds, it is still a feeling more than something that we think about

In those afternoon sessions in San Diego, I want to do a thing where we’ll work on CWB and OWI and stuff like that in groups of four after seeing it modeled by me and one other teacher. So the order for our first session on Tuesday afternoon would be: 1. I model CWB. 2.

I’ve often wondered why those Circling sessions coached by Susie and others at national conferences over the past ten years didn’t work that well. Well, in my opinion they didn’t work well because people I talked to told me they felt shitty at it. I felt shitty at it. I observed that the sessions made

Liam reports in from New Jersey: Ben: I hope your year is winding up nicely and that you’re getting pumped for SD! I had wanted to be more in touch over the blog this year but, if you recall from a previous exchange, teaching 6 different classes with multiple levels in some of them and

It is only the whole brain that can perform the nearly infinite functions necessary to grasp how the language is built (the conscious analytical mind is totally incapable of doing so). Just speak to the kids and read with them Point to the majestic design of the building of the language, which is far more

The fact is that the grammar teachers’ claim that their students can acquire a language in this way is and has been completely false. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can come from studying a language in this way. We must look at the house to learn the language, not the bricks. We don’t have to become architects

Let’s teach buildings! Let’s teach Garnier’s Opera House in Paris. We can walk around the outside of that building for three hours and barely begin to get what is on those exterior walls. And then we can go inside for the Chagall ceiling and for wonderful stories. And then we can hang out studying the

If it were a business, language education would eventually fail for the brick house reason. Few customers would be left. Administrators who continue to pay upper level teachers with seven or two white kids in an upper level classroom room rip off taxpayers. No wonder we have financial problems in our schools – we are

The result of grammar study is that the language house thus built of batches of grammar bricks has no shape or form, and, most egregiously, is not related to sound, which is what language is. How sad that years of training are given to build a house that doesn’t function or even look like a house.