I was communicating recently with Carol Gaab (President, TPRS Publishing, Inc.) about the idea of doing less reading in level 1 as per recent discussion here. My idea is to use as many of those precious 125 level one hours for nothing but listening, something Krashen didn’t disagree with when I asked him about it last […]

One of the great hells in life for teachers who use comprehension based methods is knowing that we are responsible for thematic units that are just boring. One of the worst of these is teaching classroom objects. How can we make that interesting? How can we fit them into a rockin’ story and have it not go

Bob Patrick sent this: I had a little something unexpected happen yesterday, and it looks like something I will want to repeat fairly often.  It just gave me another way to get comprehensible Latin into the ears of my kids. I have a student teacher with me this year, and he is drinking deeply at

I saw the movie Here Comes the Boom with Kevin James and Henry Winkler this weekend. I recommend it. A 42 year old biology teacher (James) tries to save his music teacher colleague’s job by becoming a cage/mixed martial arts fighter to make up for a school budget crisis. I view the film as a metaphor. While strong

I’m not sure that parallel novels can even work. I have never been able to get a parallel novel past the first few chapters – it always encounters the same limitations as the Realm did – it sets up well mechanically but when action is needed it isn’t there. However, if parallel novels are difficult, just personalizing and comparing

In almost all my classes this year, I tried “Alma“ for Halloween – a short video I found thanks to Michele. Here is the YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irbFBgI0jhM First, with VLC player, I made 12 snapshots and printed them on normal sheets of paper; these were to be shown on the blackboard. For the students I

In a recent comment I said this: “…Krashen has been busting his hump for thirty years now to show the world how people REALLY acquire languages, by listening for thousands of hours before reading and doing the two output skills….   I just wrote it wrong. It should have read:  …by listening and reading for

Ben, I really didn’t know what to expect in the crowd at this TESOL France national conference (350 people attended).  I thought I’d probably be seeing a lot of British people.  And I did, but there were also a lot more Americans than I thought I’d see, as a matter of fact the President and Vice-President

Got this from a colleague: Dear PLC friends, I need your help with a difficult situation at school. I am writing to you to sort out my thoughts, but also for your support. Today I was called in to talk with one of the high school counselors who told me that some students in my

My kids read for ten minutes at the beginning of class – SSR of the novel. Then on Friday we read and process what they read the SSR text for the entire class period. This, then, represents 95 min. of SSR/novel time – time devoted to reading – done during the week. In addition, roughly two classes are

I got a call from Diana in Philadelphia today. Not good when your boss calls you on the weekend. I had sent her an email this morning about some of what we’ve been talking about here in terms of reading too much too early. Someone who reads this blog also told her at ACTFL today about

This article is a republishing of three comments made here this morning. Two of the comments are by me and one is by Jody. They address the topic of when to start reading novels in TPRS/CI classes. I post the comments here bc they contain seeds for a discussion I believe we haven’t yet really resolved in the