Nothing like a good night’s sleep. This stuff is so complex! It involves not just work on a conscious level but also on an unconscious level so that the method can be fully integrated into our deeper minds. If we are to truly learn this method, we have to be willing to work hard. I […]

Laurie offers a perfect image to help us understand what our students experience in our CI classrsooms: For [our] students, students, [L2] is a giant green screen. [L2] is green. “New” [L2] and “old” [L2]  are all green and cannot be separated in their minds. On the other hand, acquired [L2] is now a recognizable

Chill sent me this: Hey Ben, In case you have not had time to read the latest issue of ” Foreign Language Annals”, Vol 44, No 3, Fall 2011, I recommend an article entitled ” Grammar Teaching and Learning in L2: Necessary, but Boring?” I quote: ” Finally, we wish to point out that our

I had asked Melanie to summarize the changes she made in her upper level classes as a result of a recent thread and here is what she wrote: After I sought advice from members of this blog about problems in my level 4 German class, who had already had 3 years of TPRS, I learned that

Here is the reading for tomorrow based on the story that Anne gave me published below. I arranged it so that one class did not do the story today, just PQA on the structures, so they will do the story tomorrow, but the other class did the story today so that I can model a reading class tomorrow. I

So tomorrow I have five teaching colleagues and my new principal and Diana and a district coach in my classroom for a few classes. If they all show up. That’s why I was searching around this week for a script that can be used this early with level 1 kids. As always, Anne Matava came

We all have one class that doesn’t work, in our view. It just feels wrong. The kids don’t partipate, there is a culture of passive resistance – often led by a single kid with passive aggressive tendencies, and it’s just the chemistry of the thing. We soldier on, bravely accepting this one class that we simply can’t get to

Here is the simple story – targeted for level 1 kids early in the year – that I mentioned in the last blog post: lives his girlfriend can I/ may I trashes/crashes Johnny lives in Thorndike.  His girlfriend Chelsea lives in Germany.  Johnny asks his dad, May I have the submarine?  His dad says, yes,

I was talking to Matava on the phone today – I call her whenever I need a story for an upcoming observation to see what kind of unpublished stuff she might have. I had picked out a few stories from her script books and she immediately knew that the vocabulary in those stories was too much for a first

Erik sent me a longer version and a shorter version of his bio. I chose to put the longer one here. I just love hearing the different stories! I was born and raised and am still living in San Francisco, California. In middle school, I decided I wanted to learn French because I liked the sound of the r’s

I was trying to convince a blog member about the importance of using the past tenses in all first year classes during stories (once PQA and Circling with Balls and all that stuff is over) as per: https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/08/11/on-use-of-tenses-in-stories-and-readings/ I got this response. It is heart wrenching in a way. Here a professional is being told

We don’t get the kinds of repetitions on the subjunctive that we get with other verbal structures. And it’s just not a high frequency structure in the language relative to the amount of time we have to teach it. Bryce Hedstrom has written on this topic: …studies indicate that extensive pleasure reading can give students