Laurie over on her blog has really put the discussion about scripting stories into a very fine and clear perspective. I duplicate those as three blog posts here with her permission. I will then post two texts written by Anne Matava on scripting stories, to give perspective and fullness to the discussion. Here is the […]

“You muddled it!” is not a term that I would want applied to me. And yet, I just had the opportunity to read a landmark new study on the importance of SLOW in teaching using comprehensible input, and how “You muddled it!” is indeed a term that may apply to me as a teacher. In a word, this

This is taken from comments made on the blog post “Go Willingly”. I wanted to create a category – called “Humor” – for it so that I could remember that I don’t have to be a clown in my classroom: The smallest things, looking at a coffee, can be hilariously funny. We miss that in

As Krashen says in Foreign Language Education – The Easy Way: …the system of grammar, vocabulary, etc. that needs to be acquired is too complex to be learned consciously….(p. 7). In other words, there are too many combinations of bricks for the mind to build the house of acquisition by using the medium of analysis

I got this from Bryce: Ben, This is a page from my upcoming book “Stuff for Spanish Class”, part of the “For Spanish Class” series. PLACING STUDENTS IN LANGUAGE CLASSES “Students will learn more Spanish if they keep on taking Spanish classes.” All Students Can Take Upper Level Classes (Levels III, IV and AP): All

Now that my vision is finally clear about this topic of grammar acquisition, I can see that, when the kids translate a reading text and, in doing so, get the image of a movie in their heads, they are learning how the bricks fit together without even knowing anything about the individual bricks except what

Showing the kids how the relative pronoun bricks and all those other bricks fit together is a waste of time. It’s all done in English. It’s like making the kids do a picture puzzle. So few even want to complete it. Maybe none of them does, but those who do so, do it out of

If you try to use your ipad to read the blog when you’re on the go, it may not work. When you open the website, it usually doesn’t even provide the “member log in” option, which is the little button on the top right corner. This is because the header (the stuff above the navigation

Nathan Black posted in a comment an idea about shuffling seating that has the potential to be a life saver for many of us this coming year, so I wanted to make it into a separate blog post. It is a simple answer to a big problem. I am definitely going to do it to keep

The CI train needs to stay on the tracks of the three structures. The train goes off the tracks – the CI is largely ineffective – without the three structures present in every sentence uttered in class. The three structures, in fact, drive my entire week of instruction (see Weekly Schedule New (2011). If, during the

My Rule #1 (see benslavic.com/resources/poster/classroom rules) says, “Listen with the intent to understand”. There is another one that says, “Sit up…squared shoulders…clear eyes.” And a third that says “Do your 50%” (explained in a link below). I mean those things. I defend my right to a classroom in which every single child in it does

In the past century, teachers would take a batch of bricks, grammar points arranged in chapters in books, and, laboriously, each day, boldly, inflict a kind of analytical pain session on the kids about the nature of that particular brick. They thought that they were building a grammar foundation for the kids to base their eventual