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

In this bio, Grant uses a term which I like very much – “freestyle” CI. Read on: Ben, My name is Grant Boulanger. I live in St. Paul and work in a first-ring suburb. I teach Spanish I to 8th grade students and it’s an absolute blast. But it’s only been a blast for this

Reuben is a gifted young French teacher in Denver Public Schools at George Washington High School. His kids are all about proficiency and, of all the teachers in DPS, he is the best at getting into and staying in the TL. He dropped me a note a few weeks ago about how his kids are writing and I

I contacted a friend and colleague, Michelle Bradley, about the distance I am feeling with my Latino students at Abraham Lincoln High School, whose parents are largely non-English speakers. Michelle responded with some great advice that I would like to share here for anyone in a culturally similar situation: Hi Ben, Nilva (an observing teacher

Carol found this website that looks like fun for kindergarten day: http://www.racontine.com/index.html

Jane Little just showed me a great idea from Annick Chen which many in the group may already do but had never crossed my mind in its simplicity, if you have a document camera. Your artist(s) can just take a piece of paper (those with drawing abilities can all draw during the story if they

Bob Patrick in a comment today suggested some possible additions to beef up the reading sequence found at this link: https://benslavic.com/blog/wp-admin/post.php?post=9482&action=edit They are found as optional reading steps 1 and 8 below: Option A for the W/Th class: 1. Write on the board, in L2: the title of the story, and the words who, where, what

I feel that stories require so much work and so many of us have invested so much energy in learning how to do them, but, while teaching a reading class today (just a random text that had a picture with it) it occurred to me how very easy the class was to teach. All I had

I got this from Robert Harrell a few weeks ago and it looks like I overlooked putting it up here. Please accept my aplogies. It looks like good stuff we can use: Hi Ben, Tomorrow night is our Back to School Night. I am required to have a syllabus and policies available to parents. I

David sent this: Ben, I wanted to alert everyone to what I believe to be a potentially very troubling trend in education.  The Spanish teachers at my community college organized an immersion retreat for Spanish teachers in the area.  One of the financial backers was McGraw-Hill, the publisher of the book we use Puntos de

Who said this planet doesn’t rock? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqdAnGDMU2k&safety_mode=true&persist_safety_mode=1&safe=active (with English subtitles) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgEmSb0cKBg&safety_mode=true&persist_safety_mode=1&safe=active (Documentary in English)