Two of my students came up to me today to show a comic strip they made in Spanish on their own because they’ve been testing for the last 3 days and they missed my class!  It made my day.  I showed a colleague and he immediately pointed out a grammatical error-yo me gusta, instead of […]

Hi, my name is Sabrina Janczak. This is my 3rd year teaching high school French in the Greater Chicago area. I have also taught at the college level. Teaching is a second career for me. I am forever grateful to my methods teacher who had us read Krashen’s Natural Approach and introduced us to TPR and

Brian you and Brigitte both mentioned how you actually discuss how you use comprehensible input methods with others. I have done that too, a lot, and I wish I hadn’t. You can assume that nine of ten teachers with whom you speak about the exciting things you are doing in your classroom simply don’t want

Should the artist be instructed to draw randomly or with six panels? I say that the drawings should be contained in six (horizontal) panels. The artist draws what they hear during the story or the PQA – it doesn’t matter – through the six panels, numbering each one (1 through 3 across the top and 4

I got a reflection piece from jen that I am happy to share here. It is lengthy but with stuff like this it is definitely worth the read. This idea of reflecting on our work is almost like sending in a video. It is a reflection on her first “official” story and, quite frankly, it

In her bio, Carla expressed the concern that it was too long. Actually many people have voiced that concern. It’s never too long. If you think about the two ways we are going to make this site work, they revolve around: 1. knowing each other well enough to put up average to shitty video footage

Trumpet call please – Bryce’s new website is up! It’s been in the making for some time. It’s an awesome site. It feels very “Brycie” in that friendly way of his, it’s got this great color green thing going on, and it is loaded with a lot of stuff that Bryce is famous for. The man

Dear Ben, I originally submitted my bio last spring, when I was still just thinking about TPRS.  Now, I’m 6 weeks into the new school year and trying to do the best I can with my limited experience. This is now my third year teaching German, levels 1 and 2, in a High School and

These are just some random thoughts on a few threads from yesterday: Brian has called our attention to that thread about freestyle CI, which is Grant Boulanger’s term for talking to the kids in a totally non-targeted way vs. following the three steps and the CI protocols that we have now. It is quite an interesting thread. To read it,

I am going to float these links here (the first two of eight) again. We have six more 10′ clips to go to complete the two classes that I taped last week. In particular, I want to know if the (English translation) titles are worth the time I put into them or is the video sufficient by itself to

Got this from Chill: In the most recent edition of  The Language Educator, I was pleased to see an article entitled “Teaching and Preserving Native Languages”. The article highlights the plight of many indigenous languages many of which are facing extinction. Quoting The Enduring Voices Project: ” Every fourteen days a language dies. By 2100,

In the past few weeks we have discussed nuances of Point and Pause and there may be a few lingering questions. Let’s make it simple so that we don’t get bogged down in semantics. Point and Pause is when you clarify anything that they have never heard before. The use of Point and Pause should