Get the kids talking about things they created, their drawings. This reaches them at the heart level. If you try to reach them at the level of mind (you only THINK you’re a teacher), you will fail. Communicate with them and don’t worry about what in the hell – literally – you are teaching them […]

Q. What if I don’t have enough students to fill all of the student jobs in my classroom?  A. I have concluded that only five of the jobs are truly needed. With a small class, you could do an Invisibles class with just one artist, one story writer, one quiz writer, one videographer, and one

Here is a link to a number of articles posted here on Story Listening over recent years. They are good. If you feel a need for a “pick up” in your teaching now at this hard time of year, read these articles and go ahead and do some Story Listening classes with your students this

I very much appreciate what Alisa wrote here a few years ago about nontargeted instruction, during those days when we were hammering out the NT piece here about seven years ago. It’s true. It’s what Beniko says and Krashen’s work indicates. Alisa also talks about Story Listening (Beniko Mason) here. If you are not incorporating

Here are some more thoughts about the new assessment rubric that we have been discussing lately: When I went to the ACTFL pages in my earliest efforts (2005) to break the useless and crushing-to-students ancient 100-point scale and develop a rubric that actually aligns with ACTFL and the Three Modes of Communication, knowing that my

A repost from January of 2014. It’s good to reflect on this topic from time. In 2013, Steve Krashen said (source below) that curriculum and instruction based on a grammar-based syllabus has the following problems: (a) the Natural Order problem – Krashen states that we do not know the Natural Order and even if we

Craig observes: I’m finding that classes with more native speakers can almost never make up a fun story together. Wonder why that is. It’s actually just one of my classes so far. There are only 3 or 4 non-native speakers and for the life of them they can not get interested in a story or even

This picks up on Jake’s comment: We cannot state enough that comprehension-based teaching is 100% different from other ways of teaching languages. It is different from what form-focused language teaching does. Focusing on form exercises our brains. It is conscious learning, much like memorizing vocabulary or conducting an experiment in science class or learning the

A while back I learned from a CI trainer, Valentina Correa in Chicago, a technique that the kids will love: Whenever a child successfully responds to any of the Director’s Cues prompts (at the end of a story between QL6 And QL7 or during Reading Option 7 (Reader’s Theatre), we present them with an Oscar!

My position on the question word posters is that they should be only written in English. There are two reasons for this: (1) if you point to the word and say it in the target language, with its English translation next to it, the students tend to tune out the word in the new language.

Got this from Bradley: Hi Ben, I had a short conversation with my friend that had so much to do with the work we do as second language teachers that it blew me away: My friend recently agreed to teach me to play the piano and we were listening to a few songs in the car