Focus on the beauty of the language, and not on what your students can or cannot do with it. Beauty always draws people in. So does fun. It also draws people in. Beauty and fun – don’t teach another class without them.

I feel as if the “New CI” out there is very much about making money for the new breed of purveyors of CI, who explore and pollute the purity of the research in what has become a new CI marketplace that uses social media and the internet to sell very mediocre stuff that has strayed

This was written and posted here in 2016:  Are Sauk, Latin, Myskoke, Chickasaw languages asleep or is there something more going on? It’s easy to say they’re dead or on the point of extinction (in five years 70 of the remaining 139 Native American languages will “disappear”). But are they really going to be dead?

There are teachers who earn their paychecks with an almost complete disregard for what is going on in their students’ lives, and who see their young charges as nothing more than incapable annoyances who could never compete with their five star students, those who take over the classroom and thus divide the class, labeling the

This is from my Category A book: The approach described herein involves no planning. This involves no planning of instruction and no planning of assessment as well – no preparation of tests and no grading of tests, or almost none. First, we have students writing the quizzes during class. Our use of the Interpersonal Skill

The old type of language teacher mostly only taught in ways that allowed privileged kids, usually white ones, to get into their AP classes. You know the type of teacher I mean. Other kids who “weren’t that smart” weren’t allowed into their upper level classes. But the research shows clearly that all students, regardless of

If online language instruction fails, people will lose their jobs, because they cannot deliver the product being sought by the customer. I wonder how many of us have thought about that. Are we indeed so entitled that we think we will retain our jobs after this crisis even if we don’t maintain order in and

Anyone into conspiracy theories will enjoy this post. It raises questions about whether Krashen’s work is original. It also completely supports my NTCI concept vs. “targeted” CI. This entry is from 2007. One of my middle school students – “K”  – wrote 21 posts here in 2006 (back when it was just “the blog”) about

I understand that some schools are requiring teachers to pre-record online lessons. Here is what Alisa says about that: I have to attend trainings now on Schoology, Nearpod, Flipgrid and some iPad apps like Apple Clips, Keynote, Numbers and Pages (it’s a suite) –  assuming we’ll need them for remote learning (at least partial, maybe full-on)

These people use language differently. They don’t just use words to convey ideas. There is something more to it. Those who descend from these people know about it. We don’t. Maybe some day we will. Their gaze seems to be more inward. It seems like such a different time!

There are so many experts selling CI stuff – disjointed strategies and activities – online now that it has all gotten just too big. It’s like going into one of those huge 800 acre markets in India divided into big sections where there are 570 people who all sell chicken. How much chicken do you

Dogs learn words individually, words like “Sit” or “Fetch” or “Stay”.  As humans, we require richer, more contextual input. So it is probably best that we learn languages in context, and not from individual lists of words where CI is used with the goal of making sure that certain individual vocabulary words have been learned