This was on Laurie’s site today: It’s a wonderful day! Scott Benedict has created a file on the site TPRStalk.com for Embedded Readings!!   I invite you to check in and check out the beginnings of a new resource for teachers. I have uploaded several stories as has Michele Whaley.  We will be adding more when we […]

Michael Andrews’ song Mad World poignantly describes something that kids experience in school every day: http://youtu.be/v52Igdotisk I mention it here because we are in a unique position to change what Michael sings about.

Building adminsistrators are no more qualified to assess the work of teachers than teachers are qualified to do the reverse and assess their work. True, building administrators can assess if the kids are involved or not, but since kids are always “involved” when administrators come into a classroom, those evaluations don’t mean much. Plus, we

Dr. Krashen just sent me this today: The Compelling (not just interesting) Input Hypothesis Stephen Krashen The English Connection (KOTESOL)  in press It is by now well-established that input must be comprehensible to have an effect on language acquisition and literacy development. To make sure that language acquirers pay attention to the input, it should

As many of us get ready to meet in St. Louis, those in Japan don’t need to feel left out if they can’t make it. In September, the second annual Shimabara TPRS Workshop with Susan Gross is happening, with a lot of excitement already starting due to last year’s success. Here is the link for

Bryce wrote this as a comment a while back but it should be a formal blog post so that we can categorize it and find it if we need to: Teaching with CI is a skill and one that takes time to be developed, especially when one has years of non-CI teaching habits to overcome. Your critics

More from Dr. Krashen’s The Easy Way: “A second rival hypothesis is the output hypothesis, which claims that we acquire language by producing it. There are several versions of the output hypothesis, but they all suffer from these problems: First, output istooscarce to make any important impact on langauge development; language students speak ralatively infrequently

Angela’s bio for the group: Hi Ben! I’m so thrilled to be a member of this community. I’m new to the TPRS world; I found out about it over Christmas break, and have been researching and learning since then. I currently teach Spanish at a K-8 school in southeast Georgia. This is the first year

In New England, about fifteen years ago, there was an initiative to get heart surgeons throughout that area to communicate via email, shared video, videoconferencing, workshops, etc. At the end of the study, heart surgery deaths had gone down something like 35% percent. The heart surgeons didn’t get better because their work was observed by

Drew’s bio: My name is Drew and I’m finishing my fifth year as a teacher at Rancho Cucamonga High School in Southern California. I currently teach 4 sections of Spanish, three sections of Accelerated level 2 and one section of level 3. I’m crossing my fingers that admin lets us start our German program with

Lori recently asked in a comment to the post “Dinner With People I Don’t Know” (https://benslavic.com/blog/2011/07/07/dinner-with-people-i-dont-know/): …where in the ACTFL guidelines is the part about “90% of instruction must be in the target language”…? Well, Skip and Robert found it. I think everybody on this blog is going to want to have access to this text

A “game” to consider that we do every once in a while in my classes is “Señor dice..” or “Simon says..” While we were doing TPR the first few weeks many students said many times we should “play” Simon says”. So we did after I felt we had enough vocabulary built up. The students loved