Here’s the thing: we have this computer in our minds, far greater, infinitely greater, than the most sophisticated computers ever built, and we go around thinking that we as teachers can impact the language output process of our students in a conscious way – that we can “teach them how to speak”. That doesn’t make […]
Robert tried to comment on the thread “Playing Tennis” but it disappeared somewhere so I am just putting it here as a regular blog entry: At the risk of over-intellectualizing the discussion, here are a couple of random thoughts. As much as we may reject the theorizing and academic discussion of which methodology is “right”,
I got this from Carol in New Jersey. She is asking for feedback from everyone. Could you put this out there? Circling and PQA-ing with the purchased materials is falling flat for me. Does someone who is using materials by Blaine or Carol have some advice? Example: circling and PQA-ing il coupe/he cuts and les
I was conversing in French with a student after school today. As a French 4 student soon going to France on a trip, she was concerned because she said that she had, up until this year, rarely heard the language in any of her classes up. A natural language talent (upper 1%), she seemed to
Toni you said: “I am terrible at personalizing – but I think that it’s probably because I always have an agenda.” Toni that is one powerful statement. It’s a game-changer. You also said: “With all the talk on this blog of ‘letting go’ of our old teacher selves, this post seems to be giving me
I wrote a comment today to Toni but wanted to put it, and another one, here in blog form so they can be referenced later instead of being scrolled out: A thought that I am releasing these days is that I have to get my students to learn. With my Krashen-based approach, my students learn
Q. What do you tell the students that they are doing the questionnaires for? A. I tell them that I need information to talk about in class because I think that school is boring and that, to make my own job interesting, I would want to talk about the most interesting thing that I can
Q. I wonder how you circle the name they wish to have, how you fish for more information behind it. Could you explain a bit or perhaps give a short script to make clear what exactly might go on starting from those names on the questionnaire? A. I don’t fish for more information about the
Diane Grieman sent this over from that recent L.A. TPRS meeting, as a follow up to the recent blog here on transparency: PRESENTED BY STEPHEN D. KRASHEN to a small group of language teachers in San Diego, California, on November 19, 2009 Some definitions: TRANSPARENT INPUT: the acquirer understands EVERY WORD. There is no “noise”
Q. Do you keep these questionnaires filed near the front of the class, so you can scan through them and incorporate them into stories? A. This is a very important question. I look at no more than four students’ questionnaires at a time before a regular class. Reviewing their content for at least a few minutes before
Q. I am planning on giving out the questionnaires tomorrow or Wednesday, which I haven’t been using up to this point. But I just had a couple of questions about their use. Do you always have them be their “character” in class, their pretend person instead of their actual person? Are they always answering on
I will definitely continue to study how best to use Donna’s participation rubric. I learned in that discussion about a month ago here that when I use it to judge the kids’ levels of engagement as per those ten questions (reproduced below for ease of reference), that is not what I want. It is in the
