The COVID crisis may be what we need to free TPRS and the entire CI movement from its self-imposed limits. What limits? Krashen has made it very clear that when you try to use comprehensible input to teach word lists, verb lists, thematic unit lists, semantic set lists, lists of words from chapter books (i.e. […]
The creativity that we see in the silent-era films of Buster Keaton is off the chart. But there is a reason for that – Keaton’s philosophy of making a film (and this in my view is an excellent philosophy for CI teachers to adapt) is that “the middle will take care of itself”. What does
Once in a workshop in Los Angeles, a teacher mentioned the UCLA researcher Earl Stevick (1923-2013). She said that Stevick was one of Dr. Krashen’s early mentors. The context of the conversation that day during our workshop was about how circling is not needed when using the Invisibles/emergent language because the new language tends to
I have noticed over the years that there are two ways that students look at me in class. When I am using English they seem far away. They seem to be considering what I’m saying but not really caring very much about it. I guess they hear enough English. But when I’m talking slowly in
[Note: I repost this article often, almost once a month, for any new readers here, and also because I keep adding to it. If you are willing to read all 53 of the reasons I oppose targeted comprehensible input, you might possibly find yourself echoing the a statement about classroom management by Fred Jones: “…open
Category A lends itself to your making a beautiful word flower in the first 20 minutes of class. For example, in the Henry card talk tableau vivant creation process in Phase 1 of the star sequence, the petals of that flower are made up of: Henry…plays violin…with a giant…in Canada… at 5:00 a.m….in the morning.
Craig has been using the Invisibles for three years. He shares: I like to use the idea of the Star Sequence when making observations with the class about a person or a place. In which case, the “create” is actually creating a narrative that details our observations about a thing or the life story of a
If a person gets to live 80 years on planet Earth, that’s 29,200 days. We would have to subtract a lot of those if a kid painfully goes through 12 years of homework-based education while growing up. Do we really want to force kids to do something they don’t want, when they only get 29,000
Once I was teaching a class when there was some construction work going on in the building. The workers needed to be in a certain corner/cubby part of my room. More and more workers started coming and coming and going. A few admins appeared here and there. The students I teaching at that time was
Hello Ben, I have loved the creativity of having to try to learn how to make distance learning work, never having trained for it! In particular, I’ve tried to assign activities that they can do in virtual groups, taking advantage of their attachment to their phones. That has been quite popular as a way to
Hi Ben, I’ve browsed through some of the postings and comments on your blog after the closure of schools. One comment from you resonates in my mind and I paraphrase: that the future of the teaching of FL will be online. Maybe you are right, and that is the sad direction we are moving in,
