Our group member Melissa said: I’m starting the year with the Circling with Balls activity.  It’s going great in Spanish 1, but with Level 3 I’m a little more concerned.  These students haven’t had a TCI teacher before, but I’m starting much like my 1st years while mixing in different tenses (did you play ___ […]

There was a girl who was failing all her classes. Her demeanor was just plain mean. But she was thriving in my CI classroom. She was actually the class superstar. She told me, when I asked once if I was going slowly enough, “Mr. Slavic, do you know how you can ride a bike so

I don’t believe I have ever done a comprehension check when I haven’t said to myself, “So and so’s lying there with that 8.” 8 is merely the cut off number for avoiding the radar, for flying under it. In that way, ten finger comprehension checks are flawed. It’s because we go too fast. But

This is some stuff about beginning the year I shared with Libby Whitesell recently and I thought I would just put it up here and add it to the Beginning the Year category: Libby: Is the word wall that you use in your classroom and brought to St. Louis on your site? Me: It’s not on the

Here is Laura’s second discussion point for us: Laura: Circling at the more advanced levels: this is very confusing to me. Last year I scaled down circling structures with Sp.IV seniors. I thought they didn’t need it as much, it was also much, much harder to do. I was SO, SO wrong. By April, a

The following two questions come from Laura in the form of two blog posts. They are lengthy discussions, so be forewarned on that. I am just putting our email discussion into two big blog posts for the group. There are no great answers here – it’s just a discussion we had. Laura’s questions address participation and

John sent this today: Ben, The recent article in the Atlantic Monthly on the middle class in America really made me think about some of the issues we have been discussing on the blog recently. Here is a paragraph in particular: “Among the more pernicious aspects of the meritocracy as we now understand it in

We get four kinds of responses in hand comprehension checks: 1. Many tell the truth that they get it. 2. A few tell the truth that they don’t get it. (thank goodness for them) 3. Many lie that they get it. 4. One or two refuse to listen because they want to conjugate verbs. They

The Case for Non-Targeted Comprehensible Input: The Net Hypothesis Stephen Krashen In nearly all foreign and second language classes, there is a “rule of the day” as well as vocabulary that students are expected to focus on, often referred to as “target” grammar and vocabulary. In traditional pedagogy, exercises are aimed at the conscious learning

Carla wrote: I was telling Carol that standardization is coming to my school district in the worst way. They want everyone teaching the same thing on the same day. So much for teachable moments. It isn’t expected to fully take over world languages until next year, but my principal said if that changed he would

In storytelling, many of us create stories with our students in the past tense. Then, we read generic (for all five classes) or specific (per each individual class) readings of those stories in the present tense the next day. Identification of present tense forms in reading is easily done when the story has been told in the

Dr. Krashen just wrote an article – in draft form – after St. Louis and sent it around. I will publish it here with his permission but first it might help to read the text of his new – but I think still being developed – Compelling Input Hypothesis for a little background before reading the actual