I got this question from a colleague: Hello Ben I recently bought your TPRS in a year and also the DVD’s.  After watching all the DVD’s I am wondering how or if you do (Bell Ringers, Warm ups, Self Starters)? I responded: I don’t have time. For me in my own whacky world, I feel […]

Scripting a story that is not associated with a particular text: There are a number of instances in which it is not preferable to script a story to prepare students for reading.  If you are expected to reach certain benchmarks or cover certain topics, you can script your stories from those.  Often, the students will

Susan responded to: https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/08/04/the-muddler-hypothesis/comment-page-1/#comment-20554 with the following comment: The key to slow enough is comprehension checks. Not the hold up your fingers which tells the teacher a bit but not much. Instead, do a comprehension check about every 3 questions or so. Comprehension checks take one of these three forms: 1. What did I just

The fact is that the grammar teachers’ claim that their students can acquire a language by focusing on bricks is and has always  been completely false. Nothing can come from studying a language in this way. As language teachers we need to build houses. We don’t have to become architects – no mere human could

A month ago Anne wrote a most poignant description of seeing one of they Hogs recently and how the scene in her school this next year is not what it was over past years with a new administration team. She described how the pressure against her using comprehensible input in her classroom weights very heavily on

Our blog colleague Irene has some important questions about starting the year. The basic thing she wants to know is about the rate of transition/how to transition through the first weeks/months of the year from TPR to PQA via Circling with Balls to Extended PQA where scenes develop from the PQA into, eventually, stories. For those

Kristy has a a question somebody may have an answer for: Hi Ben! I am looking for this document that I thought was on Susie’s website but I can’t find it! It’s basically a template that teachers can fill in to build a TPRS lesson. It has bubbles and lines like: Location #1 _____________ Location

The following information is taken from Anne’s Story Scripts, Vol. 1. After reading what Laurie says about scripting stories, I thought it appropriate to pull this information from an appendix (C) from that book to shed further light on the topic. Appendix C:  How to Script a Story I. Scripting a story to prepare for

A pile of bricks. That is what grammar teachers inflict on their students when they don’t present the whole building to their students from the beginning of their language study. What Susan Gross says about reading, therefore, is important [bracketed text mine]: …acquisition occurs only when the learner is focused entirely on meaning [the house],

Robert, commenting on a recent thread on assessment, wrote this: For all of the teachers who believe that one cannot speak a language without consciously knowing the rules of grammar and proper terminology, I suggest giving this “modest grammar quiz” to college-educated native English speakers, especially those who have not taken advanced grammar courses. I

I got this important email from John Piazza in San Francisco as part of an ongoing private conversation we have been sharing over the past year about Latin instruction and CI. It totally kicks ass in that it speaks to me, with my zero knowledge of how Latin instruction differs from modern language instruction, on

Choosing Structures C: Action/Reaction Revisited Earlier, we took a target structure and then brainstormed natural reactions to it. We can also reverse the process. Above we STARTED with “I need to tell you something.” and looked for the reaction. What if “I need to tell you something” WAS THE REACTION?! What could have happened that