Jody sent this link: http://ideas.time.com/2011/12/07/the-power-of-smart-listening/  

I got this from Chris today: Ben, Ohio is currently in the process of revising and rolling out new, revised Foreign Language Standards.  Currently, I’d say they align fairly well with ACTFL’s 5 Cs.  I emailed and asked the World Language Consultant in the Ohio Dept. of Education about the standards and how friendly they

Pls. find three options for 90 block classes below. I pulled these from blog posts here so that they can more easily be found in one place. I included comments so all of this is tremendously long so sorry about that. The first one, in red, targets reading only, and is used in conjunction with

It would probably be a good thing to check the phrases that go with the story before class. Think about which one(s) could lend themselves to PQA. Like today, the simple phrase “after school” turned out in one of my classes to be an entire story.  Certain phrases (structures) lend themselves to PQA in wonderful

This is a comment turned blog entry from a week ago about the history, as I see it, of comprehension based instruction over the past fifty years: We must respect the vision set out in 1983 when the push towards fluency instruction in ACTFL – on the level of theory only in those years, unfortunately –

From John: Here is a Latin story loosely based on Talks Too Much. As you can see, the details got a bit out of hand, and I chose to include more details that I would have liked, but the kids – 7th grade Latin 1 students – responded well. Blaterat: Talks a Lot Ecce Mr.

From Brigitte: Hi, This is a reading based on a Matava script (the ever popular Refrigerator story).  I used it for level one and it worked great.  I was a bit concerned that the structures might be a bit too advanced but the kids absolutely surprised me – the have those structures down pat.  There

From Wikipedia: “An idée reçue is a received, or accepted, idea. This term was used by Gustave Flaubert in his work Le Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues to refer to a catch phrases and platitudes, most of which are as paradoxical as they are insipid. A platitude is a trite, meaningless, biased or prosaic statement that

Story scripts should be simple and emotional. Students are attracted to verbs and emotions. But too many verbs confuse them and stories lacking in emotion bore them. Amy Catania wrote a story about a waitress who lost her new ring and started jumping up and down on a table screaming, “Where is my ring?” Everybody looked

Got this from Michael today: Hi Ben, Here’s a counter perspective my buddy sent me that he ran into on StudySpanish.com: http://www.studyspanish.com/whyteachgrammar.htm I also included my response. Just thought it was hilarious to read this article and someone trying to defend the traditional approach to teaching Spanish.  It’s a great site for anyone interested in

Designing a curriculum based on a novel can be a very effective way to acquire a language. How to do it? The following ideas are suggested: 1. The instructor looks at the first chapter of the book and picks out the vocabulary that the kids need to be able to eventually read the chapter. The goal is

You take a chapter from the novel and, going paragraph by paragraph, you do the following: 1. the students read the paragraph silently or translate with a partner if they can handle that. 2. you read it aloud while they read it silently. (loudly and slowly – this marinates the content for later). 3. you and the group