Robert gave a nice rundown of some terms that are thrown around a lot in language circles. Below he explains these terms to Chris, who right now is the kid enjoying challenging the emperors on their clothes or lack thereof as he works on a master’s thesis comparing terms like the ones below to what […]

A U-Maine French professor wrote a text on input that caught skip’s attention, who shared it with me. My opinion is that this professor would fail badly in secondary schools, and that she likely reaches a lot less of her four percenter dominated college classes than she may think with this approach. I’m sorry but I laughed – I couldn’t

Heh heh. I just keep coming up with these annoying acronyms. Here’s another one – sabrina’s Writing Idea, or sWI. It is an excellent idea and easily put in place just by extending a story class by one day so thank you Sabrina: One thing I started doing last year on the second semester with my French 2

Chris needs answers from the group: Ben, I was thinking, I could use some definitions of some terms we throw around.  We obviously know what somebody means when they say CI or TPRS but, I was wondering if we could get some definitions for some other terms. I’m going to ask you a question here

I had asked David to write out a description of his plan with examples just to make it more clear. The original discussion a week ago was here: https://benslavic.com/blog/2012/12/01/embedded-reading-activity/ dRP (David’s Reading Plan): Day 1: 1. Select or create a story script using 2 or 3 new structures. 2. Give the students a handout of

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sir-ken-robinson/do-schools-kill-creativity_b_2252942.html

Remember when you were little and sometimes you played ball, learning about throwing and catching? You even threw it to people. And they caught it sometimes! And YOU caught it sometimes! Lets’ break that down in terms of what was happening in your two year old self’s language acquisition process, which, at two years, was  rolling

jen has a question for us. We owe her, for her awesome jGR, so answer her well: So today, out of the blue, the new French teacher (who has in level 3 the group that I had doing CI for 1.5 out of their first two years) came to ask for some advice. I am

Carol suggests that we talk about getting some ideas for writing. We don’t have many. It’s a good idea: ….when it comes to the baby steps of writing that eventually morph into the upper level writing, there are not many comments aside from timed writing. Could anyone comment on how and when they get their

Jody does this thing where she interviews her kids. It’s a good one: I never “circle” in reading. (I have a lot of reasons for not doing it, but I don’t believe there are any “rules” associated with this one way or the other.) We just translate; I ask a few comprehension questions, and perhaps

This suggestion from Ben Lev addresses a problem that I am sure most of us have without even being aware of it: Yesterday in the middle of a story I was getting great response from the same handful of students and mediocre response from the large middle group. I explained in English to my student

A minor but super important thread to me in the past few weeks here has been the one on the rich wanting to hire their own Latin tutors and keeping instruction like it was in the 18th century. If you are aware of that thread, you may want to read on, as Jody shares an interesting YouTube video