If a child feels that they are a valued member of a classroom community, they will acquire the language. But many kids haven’t the slightest idea what being in a classroom community even means. It is due to the fallout from being in schools, where building classroom communities can’t compete with the teacher’s need to […]

How to speak to our students in a way that uplifts? It’s so simple. First, we must of course speak so slowly to them that they understand effortlessly (Krashen). We know we are doing this when it is painful for us to speak that slowly – because when we speak so slowly that it is

How to build up damaged kids so that they are happy members of our classroom communities? How to make our students want to be in our classes and slowly, via trust in us and in the way we are teaching them and in their peers, become productive members of our class community? The strategies –

A repost: Sean Lawler wrote recently that we all have our moments where we speak in English at length about whatever comes up that is just too interesting to not talk about in English. I think this helps with the long block, especially for the older kids. Here’s an example English tirade we went on:

Clearly, the case being made here is that shame plays a major role in preventing real communities from forming in our classrooms. What to do about it? In my view, the best way to neutralize the effects of shame in our classrooms is to offer a superior, feel-good and strongly inclusive community building curriculum (see

I got the message below from a teacher whose employers think that the standards are connected to all four of the four skills at all levels. That thinking is not in touch with the research about how people acquire languages.  If you want to educate yourself about the term Standards Based Grading search in the

What kind of shame do our kids experience that prevent community from happening in our classrooms? (1) Testing shame is a big one. High stake testing starts in elementary school, which is outrageous, and it is this testing that by high school is so out of control that it represents perhaps the biggest impediment to

The isolation that we see in some students plays a tremendous role in preventing them from making strong and observable gains in the language. Therefore, a focus on building community is just as important as one on comprehensible  input when developing best practices in our field. In my opinion comprehensible input and building community are

When CI teachers tell their kids not to speak in class because they are “not ready” to do so, they misinterpret the research, and it hurts the kids. If we just give them enough time to process each thing we say, and at the same time, make it interesting, then, when they try to speak,

This is an important presentation that Beniko shared with us in France in 2016: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Pud4inlrESpwVOyRh97jbVpDbqBdgWVpfcxTqG0iMlQ/edit?usp=sharing

I wonder why we have kept the grammar/translation paralysis-by-analysis left brain dominant way of teaching languages for so long. The research has show that it doesn’t work, so why prolong our students’ agony and delay the day when smiles of inclusion of all students are finally seen in our language classes? In talking about “identity

Perhaps the very concept of building a learning community, so vital to everything we do in our classrooms, has eluded us. It’s like Robert said in his recent comment here on rigor – perhaps we should define the term first. To me, community in my classroom is the place where I find validation of myself