Jen sent this: Ok, so I just had the kids do a bit of reflection today. Two out of ten students in a level 2 French class actually requested some “book learning.” I don’t have their responses handy or I’d quote them, but I’ll paraphrase below. My question is how do I respond to these […]

Dori, who lives in Parker, CO, sent this today: Hi Ben: Yesterday our district had a job-alike day, so we had a workshop focusing on ACTLF’s three modes of Communication (curiously, no mention of the 90% in the language!).  Anyway, I was struck by: a.  the number of people who have no idea what the

Here is the first script we are using in the Beniko study. It is related to a series of recent comments involving Chris and I about making PQA work: Script #1 steals takes out something escapes Debbie steals a BMW.  The police catch her and bring her to jail.  She takes out something sharp and

I got this question from a group member: …if I could go to just one of the conferences (NTPRS or iJFLT), which would you recommend?   I think I can only manage one and I would be at a loss to choose the one that would be best for me…. David Young commented on what he sees as

From time to time I will update those in the group who are interested on how our Beniko Mason/Krashen study is going. This is what we hope will be the first valid study comparing CI based instruction with traditional instruction.  We started this week. Paul Kirschling identified about 42 verbs that we assumed/agreed were “pre-taught” from first semester. These are simple and common verbs like

We here in Colorado are extremely proud to announce that the second iFLT Conference will be held just up the road from Denver in Breckenridge, Colorado the week of July 16 – 20, which is the week before NTPRS. The website (link below) went live today, but so far only the conference information is available on it

A question about portfolios from Angela: Hey Ben! I’m interested in creating student portfolios that can show parents/administrators student achievements & successes in the target language using TPRS. Could you throw this out there to the blog group to see if anyone has successfully done student portfolios, and if so, what types of artifacts were

It has been awhile since we talked about the importance of the ACTFL Three Modes of Communication, so I thought Iwould bring them back up here today. Actually, what I am publishing here is a local state level documents that acknowledges the role of the three modes in 21st century second language classrooms. This is

An excellent bio from Lea: My name is Lea Ekeberg, and I teach Chinese in an independent school in Washington, DC.  I’m in my eighth year of teaching now, and I first experienced TPRS two years ago at ACTFL in one of Carol Gaab’s ACTFL sessions.  The chance to experience the method as a learner

This text by Drew was written as part of a grant process that got him over to Germany last summer to study at the Goethe Institut. Part of his grant was to write an article for the California Language Teachers Association. The title of his piece was “A Claim for Comprehensible Input.”  The article explains how he learned much more German doing things he

This goes under a new category called Poetry. They are poems that I like to teach my students. If we can get some of your favorites in Spanish and German and other languages, we could share them in much the same way as we are now beginning to share songs and readings. The first one is

Mamba Verde Patricio y Shrek están caminando por selva. Buscan tigres. Patricio busca un tigre blanco y Shrek busca uno verde. Los dos están caminando con cuidado, porque es importante caminar con cuidado en la selva. De repente, Shrek es mordido por un serpiente. ¡Es un Mamba Verde! Los Mamba Verde son muy venenosos, así